JEWISH INFLUENCE IN THE MASS MEDIA Part II

In 1985 Laurence
Tisch, Chairman of the Board of New York University, former President of the
Greater New York United Jewish Appeal, an active supporter of Israel, and a
man of many other roles, started buying stock in the CBS
television network through his company, the Loews Corporation.
The Tisch family, worth an estimated 4 billion dollars, has major interests
in hotels, an insurance company, Bulova, movie theatres, and Loliards, the
nation's fourth largest tobacco company (Kent, Newport, True cigarettes).
Brother Andrew Tisch has served as a Vice-President for the UJA-Federation,
and as a member of the United Jewish Appeal national youth leadership
cabinet, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Israel Political
Action Committee, among other Jewish organizations. By September of 1986
Tisch's company owned 25% of the stock of CBS and he became the company's
president. And Tisch -- now the most powerful man at CBS -- had
strong feelings about television, Jews, and Israel. The CBS
news department began to live in fear of being compromised by their boss --
overtly, or, more likely, by intimidation towards self-censorship --
concerning these issues. "There have been rumors in New York for years,"
says J. J. Goldberg, "that Tisch took over CBS in 1986 at least
partly out of a desire to do something about media bias against Israel."
[GOLDBERG, p. 297]

The powerful
President of a major American television network dare not publicize his own
active bias in favor of another country, of course. That would look bad,
going against the grain of the democratic traditions, free speech, and a
presumed "fair" mass media. And if it ever became clear that the
CBS news department was in danger of turning into an ad agency for
Israel, the resulting controversy would probably defeat Tisch's purpose in
helping them. But word leaked out, that CBS news under
Laurence Tisch lived in fear of being ethically compromised.
During the
Palestinian Intifada (the stone-throwing revolt by Palestinian Arabs against
Israeli military rule), a birthday party was held by Jewish TV personality
Barbara Walters and her husband Merv Adelson for Jewish Federal Reserve
Board Chairman Alan Greenspan. Other invited Jewish guests included former
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and U.S. News and World Report
publisher, Mortimer Zuckerman.

According to Roone
Arledge, the President of ABC News, who was also a guest at the party, a
long and heated debate arose about television's depiction of the Israeli
military's attempts to crush Arab rioting. CBS President Tisch
argued that TV should effectively censor reports on what was happening, that
"television ought to be banned in the occupied territories "because it
portrayed Israeli soldiers in a bad light. Kissinger had argued the same a
few weeks earlier, publicly concerned that "TV cameras incited riots and
tarnished Israel's reputation." Arledge vehemently
argued that the media's ethical stand should be to be present and report
whatever was happening, when and wherever possible.

Barbara Walters
and Mortimer Zuckerman covered for Tisch and they all denied that he took
such an irresponsibly biased, and disturbing, position.
According to (Jewish) reporter Ken Auletta, however, eight other people at
the party testified -- five to him personally -- that
Tisch did. Jewish guests at the party, led by Tisch,
also attacked Arledge's ABC anchorman (who was not present) Peter Jennings,
for being -- as they saw it -- too "anti-Israel. "Several guests," writes
Auletta, "came away deeply distressed by Tisch's behavior. What disturbed
them was that the President of CBS seemed to say that the
perceived interests of Israel took precedence over the interests of
CBS News. Tisch's reflex, they felt, was to defend Israel, not his
network; he was blaming Jennings and the press for reporting Israel's
excesses, not Israel committing them. " [AULETTA p. 488-490]

Tisch's strong
emotions about Israel were exhibited in other ways. After CBS's
popular news program, 60 Minutes, did a story about the Jewish
lobbying group AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), Tisch
was furious with his employees because the program made Jews, to his eyes,
look too powerful. (Curiously, long-time CBS reporter, David
Schoenburn, notes that both 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt, and 60
Minutes reporter, Mike Wallace (both Jewish), "were personal friends of
Larry Tisch." [SCHOENBURN, p. 6]) Tisch reportedly even
called the reporter of the AIPAC story, Wallace, a self-hating Jew. Tom
Wyman, the non-Jewish CEO of CBS, joined in the fray, at
another party. He was reported by Newsweek to have complained "that
Tisch's enthusiasm for 'pro-Israel' causes and charities might compromise
the independent reporting of CBS news." [AULETTA,
p. 164]

This attitude by
powerful Jewish media figures reflects a certain tradition, and recalls the
case in the late 1940s of Adolph Schwimmer who "became the Jewish state's
prime [arms] smuggler in America." Among his close contacts was Herman
"Hank" Greenspun, the publisher of the Las Vegas Sun. Greenspun once
noted that he was a Zionist "before I could even identify a picture of
George Washington." [RAVIV, p. 40] During Israel's "War of Independence" in
1948, Greenspun traveled to "Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and
Panama, where he organized false documents, bank guarantees, and arms
shipments to Israel." [RAVIV, p. 41] "Hank Greenspun," notes Alex Pelle,
"embarked on an
incredible odyssey, plundering a naval depot in
Hawaii, seizing a
private yacht at gunpoint near Wilmington, California,
and posing in Mexico
as a confidential agent of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's
government. A single driving purpose generated over the
span of seven months
all those seemingly unrelated events: to fill the
holds of a ship ...
with six thousand tons of contraband rifles, machine
guns, howitzers,
cannons, and ammunition, destined for the port of
Haifa and Israel's
beleaguered Jews. In so doing, Hank Greenspun
had violated the
United States' Neutrality Act, the Export Control Law, and
Presidential Proclamation 2776." Thanks to Jewish lobbying
pressure, Greenspun
was pardoned by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. [GREENSPUN,
H., 1966, p. ix]
*********************************************
In 1989 the
Time Inc. corporate media giant merged with Warner
Communications to become Time-Warner Communications, the
largest media organization at the time in the world. (Sigmund Warburg, an
internationally renowned Jewish banker who represented the London Daily
Mirror Group, then the largest newspaper company on earth, had years earlier
tried to buy Time, Inc., to no avail). [CLURMAN, p. 31] When
the dust had settled this time, Steve Ross, a Jewish entrepreneur who
started out working for a funeral home, sat astride the monstrous merger,
the highest paid corporate executive in America. His $39.1 million in 1990
as co-CEO, sole chairman and chief decision-maker, was 1,363 per cent above
the corporate average. [CLURMAN p. 304] The merger, notes Richard Clurman,
"was the creation of the biggest media empire, the corporate interfaith
marriage of the sixty-seven-year-old Time Inc., a WASPy
blue-chip American institution, for years the largest combined magazine and
book publisher on earth, to Steven J. Ross's poker-chip Warner
Communications, Inc., the pop entertainment conglomerate whose movies
and sounds of music ricochet around the world." The Time Inc.
stable included such venerable publishing mainstays as Time, Life,
Fortune, Sports Illustrated, People, Money,
Time-Life Books, the Little-Brown publishing house, HBO
(long time chief: Michael Fuchs), the Book of the Month Club, and
television stations. It even held a 20.5% share in the ownership of
Turner Broadcasting (of CNN fame) and 10.5% voting
power in it. Warner contributed the likes of LorimarTelevision, Atco-East/West Records,
Atlantic Recording, Quincy Jones Entertainment,
Elektra Communications, DC Comics, as well as the Batman
movie, Rod Stewart, Madonna, Bugs Bunny, and the rest of its vast
movie-music empire. (By 1997 Time-Warner even owned the rights
to the photographs, other images, and words of Martin Luther King, Jr.) In
his earlier years, Ross had revitalized Warner-Seven Arts by buying cable-TV
monopolies, as well as major interests in the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball
team, Ralph Lauren perfume and cosmetics, and other investments. A month
after the Time-Warner merger, federal bank regulators
instituted new restrictions to hinder such "highly leveraged transactions."
[CLURMAN, p. 33]
Steve Ross (whose
father changed his surname from Rechnitz, and whose former stepfather,
William Paley, for decades controlled CBS) was widely known as a man of
dubious ethics and caused consternation among many journalists at
Time that such a man was about to take them all over. He
has been an "unindicted co-conspirator" in a 1979 United States Justice
Department case investing underworld money laundering operation in suburban
New York City. His "top lieutenant" at Warners took the fall
and admitted guilt; likewise, Warners' assistant treasurer (who
handled Ross's personal accounts) was also convicted of fraud and perjury. [CLURMAN,
p. 29] In earlier years Ross had merged his funeral home
operation with a parking lot company, Kinney National Service,
which had its own "unsavory reputation." "There were rumors that Kinney was
mobbed up [i.e., tainted by organized crime]," notes Fred Goodman, "Caesar
Kinney, Kinney's executive vice president and original owner of Kinney's
parking lot business, was the son of Emmanuel Kinney, a well-known New
Jersey gambler." [GOODMAN, p. 137-138] (In 1969 Ross and the Kinney company
bought Warner-Seven Arts from Elliott Hyman for $400 million.
[Sam Kinney had been head of production; Benny Kalmensan was the number two
man.] For his part, Hyman's earlier company was Associated Artists
Productions, which had purchased the entire pre-1948 Warners film
library in 1956. Associated Artists' chairman was Louis Chesler,
who, notes Andrew Yule, was a man "with established ties to Mafia boss Meyer
Lansky. Nor was this AA's only shady connection. Its vice-president, Morris
'Mac' Schwebel, would later be convicted of criminal activity." [YULE, p.
176])
The 1989 merger of
the two super companies, Time and Warner, also
raised issues of conflict of interest. How could Time,
Fortune, and other magazines now be expected to give honest reviews and
evaluations of Warners movies, records, and other enterprises?
Richard Clurman notes the fact, for instance, that an August 1991
Fortune article called "The Deal Decade: Verdict of the 80s" ...
"sharply criticized leveraged excesses deal by deal, with the names and
numbers of the dealmakers but it skipped one of the highest profiles of them
all, the Time-Warners merger." [CLURMAN, p. 305]
Among the
central negotiators in the mega-merger was the Jewish Vice-President of
Time, Inc., Jerry Levin, "chief tactician for
Time's merger with Warner," and Ed Aboodi, an Israeli-born
"financial consultant" for Warners. Aboodi's reputation, says
Clurman is that of a "shadowy mystery man ... [He] was an invisible mystery
man to the world outside Warners until the Time-Warner
deal." Investigative reporter Richard Clurman found no listing in any
telephone directory for his Alpine Capital Company, which is
housed in the Time-Warner building. "Aboodi says he has no
telephone listing for Alpine because 'people know me and they know how to
find me. I've never thought about it." [CLURMAN, p. 165] "Levin and Aboodi,"
says Clurman, "a Delphic-like oracle and a Talmudic-like exegetist, [are]
quite a combination for an intricate modern business deal. Levin even spoke
of the 'thaumaturgic (i.e., mystical) significance' of some of their
meetings." [CLURMAN, p. 166] "While his peers have been
unabashedly striving to scale the corporate ladder to attain the personal
perquisite of power and wealth," notes Connie Bruck, "Levin has long
maintained that he has been compelled by something far less mundane, almost
mystical: a sense of obligation to bring to fruition the 'manifest destiny'
of Time, Inc. and, now, Time Warner." [BRUCK, p.
55] Ultimately, the Chief Financial Officer, the General Counsel, and
Secretary of the Board for the new company were all to come from
Warners. [CLURMAN, p. 197-198] The new company committed up to $150
million to a fund managed by Aboodi's Alpine Capital company,
as well as providing him his $8 million advisory fee.
By 1991
Time-Warner announced a deal with the largest of Japanese venture
capital trading firms, C. Itoh, and Toshiba; this
translated into a Japanese investment of another billion dollars. The
massive mega-company then hired former Federal Communications Commission
chairman Dennis R. Patrick and "two corporate 'image makers' who had worked
at the White House" to help maneuver governmental regulatory policies.
Time-Warner "also had on retainer an elegant pack of the most
connected Washington lobbyists." [CLURMAN, p. 338] The new
Time-Warner soon also acquired Sunset magazine, Lane
Publishing, and 50% interest in Six Flags Amusement Parks.
"Time-Warner,"
wrote Richard Clurman in his book about the subject in 1992, "is a
combination whose creations (magazines, books, movies, music, cable TV, and
programming) are now exposed to the minds and emotions of more people than
those of any other commercial enterprise on earth ... [CLURMAN,
p. 33] [Time-Warner executives] frequently predicted that one
day '5 or 6 media companies would dominate the world.'" [CLURMAN, p. 338]
After the big
merger, ruefully notes Clurman, for twenty years a journalist and executive
at Time, Inc., "in a bicoastal, cross-cultural anointing,
Time's house organ [had a column on new
executive titles] under the heading 'Honorable Menschen"
[a Yiddish pun]. Within the same two weeks, Nick Nicholas [the co-chairman
of Time-Warner, eventually dumped from that position], was
given a American-Jewish Committee Human Relations Award in Los Angeles and
Steve Ross was named Man of the Year by the Entertainment Division of the
UJA [United Jewish Appeal] in New York." [CLURMAN, p. 314] (Steve Ross was
"one of the role models" for Oskar Schindler in Stephen Spielberg's film
Schindler's List. "To prepare [actor Liam Neeson] for the part, the
director reportedly showed pictures of Ross ... a wheeler-dealer of
legendary proficiency." [KELLMAN, p. 10] Schindler was also likened to
another Jewish media mogul, Michael Ovitz, "on top of the mountain pulling
strings in every fiefdom down below." [KELLMAN, p. 10]
When Steve Ross
subsequently died of cancer, Gerald Levin replaced him as head of
Time-Warner after a struggle for power, successfully firing presumed
heir, Nick Nicholas. (Levin's son, Lee, is studying to be a rabbi at the
Jewish Theological Seminary. [BOXER, T., 5-26-01] Soon Norman Pearlstine,
formerly the head of the Wall Street Journal and Jewish, was
installed as editor of Timemagazine.
More recently, in
1995, Disney's Jewish chairman Michael Eisner announced the $19
billion acquisition of Capital Cities-ABC to create an even
larger corporate media monolith, relegating massive Time-Warner
to second size. Disney-ABC controls, aside from the obvious,
everything from the Anaheim Angels baseball team and the
MightyDucks hockey team to Miramax Films
(co-chaired by the Jewish Weinstein brothers, Harvey and Bob) and the
ESPN sports network (Jewish president and CEO, Steven
Bornstein). Disney also owned Fairchild
Publications which included fashion magazine Jane, W,
Supermarket News, Women's Wear Daily, Chilton Books,
Los Angeles Magazine, and numerous newspapers and TV stations. Not to
be out-fattened, Gerald Levin at the heal of Time-Warner soon
absorbed Ted Turner's media empire, Turner Broadcasting,
including CNN. [BRUCK, p. 58] Turner was
relegated to second in command at Time-Warner. Head of the
Turner Broadcasting System division in 1999? Brad Siegel. The
new chief of CNN in 2001? Also Jewish: Walter Isaacson, formerly
Time Inc.'s editorial director.

And this is how a Jewish ethnic
online magazine described Brad Turrell, number 12 in its 2001 "Fifty Most
Influential Jews in America":

"While Turrell was the head of communications for the WB
television network, he
began a religious odyssey that transformed he and his family into
observant
Jews. Well, the Lord works in mysterious ways. In April, he was
promoted
to the top communication slot for all of Turner Broadcasting
which includes TNT,TBS Superstation, the WB Network, Cartoon Network,
Turner Classic Movies,Turner South and Boomerang, the CNN News Group Networks,
which includesCNN/U.S., CNN Headline News, CNNfn, Accent
Health, CNN Airport Network,College Television Network (CTN), CNN Radio Network,
CNN.com, CNNfn.com,CNNfyi.com and MyCNN.com and Nascar.com. With all
the recent claims [by
Jewish lobbying organizations] of CNN's alleged media bias
against Israel, it will
be interesting to see how Turrell handles the position." [JEWSWEEK,
2001]

The aforementioned Weinstein brothers "run a company [Miramax]
that released more movies than any other in the U.S. in the year 2000 and
had the eighth-largest box-office receipts." "After Disney paid $60 million
for Miramax in 1993," notes New York Magazine, "[Harvey] Weinstein
spent his time buying his way to the Oscar platform and getting in touch
with his inner thug by screwing over far more delicate artistic sorts ...
But all the legendary bad behavior [by him] cannot obscure an objective
fact: Harvey Weinstein is a cultural good. Pulp Fiction, Sex,
Lies, and Videotape, and Shakespeare in Love have all become a
part of the national narrative, framing the way people dance, talk, and
fight ... [Weinstein] is a pushcart peddler who is more than happy to put
his thumb on the scale when the old woman is buying meat,' says [fellow
Jewish] producer Saul Zaentz. 'He has not qualms about it ... 'People say,
'Are you tough?' I say: 'Facing [Jewish Hollywood moguls] Barry Diller,
Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, David Geffen, you know, Stephen
Spielberg ... Why the hell would you have to be tough in this industry to
survive? Those guys are just a walk in the park?'" [CARR, D., 12-03-01]

(Among Weinstein's most recent projects -- like so many Jewish moguls
-- is one with a Holocaust theme (this one based on a piece of fiction by
Jewish novelist Leon Uris, Mita 18.) "'I'm preparing to direct a movie about
the Warsaw Ghetto. About Jews kiling fucking Germans in great numbers,' he
says with enthusiasm.") [CARR, D., 12-03-01] "It makes no sense at
all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular
culture," wrote Jewish author, film critic, and talk show host Michael
Medved in 1996,
"Any list of the
most influential production executives at each of
the major movie
studios will produce a heavy majority of recognizable
Jewish names."
[MEDVED, p. 1] ... Consider the well-publicized
reshuffling that
recently rocked the Walt DisneyCompany, involving
some of the
mightiest and most highly paid media moguls. In this game of corporate musical
chairs, Disney C.E.O. and Chairman of the Board, Michael Eisner lost
the services of his movie production chief, Jeffrey Katzenberg, who
became part of the much-heralded new "dream team"
(formally
incorporated as DreamWorks SKG) with Steven Spielberg
and David Geffen.
{[In 1990 Forbes magazine called Geffen -- a former
agent and record
producer -- the richest man in Hollywood." [KOTKIN,
p. 62] The first
project out of DreamWorks was also by a Jewish producer, Gary
Goldberg, whose earlier "gentle, semi-autobiographical
look at a
middle-class Jewish family" lasted 35 episodes in 1991-92 on
CBS [CEROWE,
p. F1]] Meanwhile, Eisner created a new position at
Disney for his
omnipotent super agent Michael Ovitz and gave broader
responsibilities to
his fair-haired boy, Joe Roth, former head of 20th Century Fox
... These headlines underscored the ironic fact that the
famous Disney
organization, founded by a gentile Midwestern who
allegedly harbored
anti-Semitic attitudes now features Jewish personnel in nearly all its
most powerful positions." [MEDVED, p. 37]
Among these personnel
is also Michael Lynton, appointed to be the head of Disney's
movie division in 1994. At the very start of Eisner's tenure at
Disney, Katzenberg headed the Disney studios, fellow Jew
Richard Frank headed television, and David Hoberman was the chief at the
film division. [SCHWEIZER/SCHWEIZER, p. 5] Joseph Shapiro became a Disney
Senior Vice President in the 1990s. Steven Bornstein is (2001) chairman of
Walt Disney Internet Group, heading Disney's commercial explorations
of the world wide web. Even the president of the Disney-founded California
Institute of the Arts is Jewish, Steven Lavine. In earlier years, during
Saul Steinberg's attempt to lead a hostile takeover of the famous WASP firm,
some observers were concerned that the "take over battle might be regarded
as an attempt by Jews to topple one of the temples of Protestant America."
[TAYLOR, J., p. ix] At that time, when Walt Disney's
nephew, Roy E. Disney, held the largest individual stake in the company, his
lawyer was also Jewish: Stanley Gold. [TAYLOR, J., p. 3]
Gold eventually became "a financial power through Roy
Disney's Shamrock Holdings and one of the largest foreign
investors in Israel." [TUGEND 10-22-99])

As Carl Hiaasen wrote, in his 1998 volume Team Rodent -- How Disney
Devours the World:

"In December
1997 Disney chairman Michael D. Eisner exercised company
stock options that brought him $565 million in a single swoop. The
notion of
attaching such a sum to one man's job is both obscene and hilarious on
its face,
yet it's pointless to debate whether or not Eisner deserves it. He got
the dough.
It happened in the same month that Business Week chose Disney's
board of
directors as the worst in America. The reason: Many seemed to have
been
handpicked not so much for their business expertise as for their
loyalty to the
autocratic Eisner. Among the company's directors are his personal
architect, his
personal attorney, the principal of his children's elementary school,
and seven
current and former Disney executives 'Fantastic' is how Eisner has
described his
choices for the board. But critics say it's a meek and malleable
group. That's
precisely what was needed to sit still for the ludicrous $75 million
platinum parachute
given to Michael Ovitz [also Jewish] as compensation for fourteen
whole months as president of the Walt Disney Company."[Hiaasen, C., 1998, p. 38-39]In 1997, when Lilian
Disney (Walt's widow) donated $50 million towards building a Los Angeles
cultural center called Disney Hall (named in honor of her husband),
Variety noted lingering (Jewish) animosity towards him:
"So far [her
donation is] the only notable sign of financial support from
the film industry or
its players for the new concert hall in downtown Los Angeles ... The fact
that the hall bears the name of Disney [is] possibly a
turnoff to other
studios." [JOHNSON, p. 11]
"Not everyone was
happy with the 'inevitable' changes [resulting from the arrival of Eisner
and his new management at Disney in the 1980s]," notes Joe
Flower, "Letters to the Los Angeles Times, homeland newspaper to the
company and the entertainment industry, ran heavily negative, complaining of
the compromise in quality in Disney's Saturday morning
cartoons, the 'commercialism' of the new management's projects and the
dilution of the Disney name." [FLOWER, p. 192] In 1985 Disney announced that
pop star Madonna would star in one of its films (she eventually didn't) and
affiliates of the great bastion of "family entertainment" began to produce
R-rated films. The movie Pulp Fiction (produced by a Disney
affiliate, Miramax) was decried by some for its graphic and
celebratory violence. By 1987, when Disney had a quarterly
profit increase of 159%, Chairman Eisner got a $2.6 million year-end bonus
while rank-and-file Disney employees found their health
insurance deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses doubled. [FLOWER, p. 257]
As Disney
profits soared and its "family values" reputation corroded, in 1997 the
Southern Christian Baptist Convention initiated a boycott of all
Disney products, in part because of Disney-ABC's homosexual
sit-com, "Ellen." In 1997 too the Catholic League for Religion and Civil
Rights, already protesting a Disney-sponsored feature film
called "Priest,” successfully lobbied at least seven corporations to pull
their ads from a new Disney-ABC series called "Nothing Sacred,"
which featured, as some expressed it, "an inner city
priest's struggles with his religious beliefs." The offended Catholic
organization decried the TV program for containing "slanderous assaults"
against the Church. (Similarly, in 1992, a few Catholic
newspapers refused to accept advertising for a novel by Jewish author Erich
Segal, Acts of Faith, the story of a love affair between a Catholic
seminarian and an Orthodox Jewish woman.) The conservative Focus on the
Family organization also instituted its own boycott against any product with
a Disney label. In 1995 the well known Disney
"family entertainment" company was scandalized when it was revealed that the
director, Victor Salvo, of a new Disney movie called "Powder,"
was a convicted child molester. In 1999 Disney invited
controversy with its film about the life of New York mass murderer David
Berkowitz, the "Son of Sam." Even the killer himself was outraged by the
movie. "Let me tell you something," said Berkowitz from prison, "Walt Disney
must be turning over in his grave." [HARDEN, p. 22]
As Rabbi Daniel Lapin
notes about the aforementioned Disney movie Priest,
"When it came to
Priest, there were few courageous Jewish leaders out there who stepped
to the defense of Catholics ... It was
appropriate for Jews
to join in the denunciation of Priest. After all, the head of Disney as
well as the heads of its distribution subsidiary, Miramax, are Jewish.
We may feel that making such an observation is in bad taste. If
non-Jews make the same observation we no doubt
will immediately
recognize them as anti-Semites. However, this kind of intimidation will
not stop many Americans from making that observation. Neither
will it stop them from seeing as insulting that the companies just
happened to choose Good Friday as the date for this film's
national release." [LAPIN, D., 1999, p. 311]
In 1994
Disney faced claims that its Lion King character was pilfered from a
40-year old Japanese story by Tezauka Osamu. In 1990 advocates for the
homeless managed to get Disney to stop selling a tramp toy. In
1996 the World Development Movement protested Disney's
exploitation of toy-makers in Third World countries. In 1997 nearly forty
organizations joined the National Hispanic Media Coalition protests against
Disney and its ABC network for alleged
discrimination in hiring. In 1997, after media embarrassment, Disneyland
reinstated a discount program for the disabled it had tried to quietly
rescind. In 1997, too, Disney CEO Michael
Eisner (already since 1984 the highest paid executive in the United States
at $660 million over 11 years), succeeded in getting a ten-year future
"compensation package" for himself that could be worth close to $800
million, a sum attacked at a Disney shareholders meeting by
about twenty investor organizations, including the California Public
Employees Retirement System. After a failed 14-month
hiring of Eisner's (Jewish) friend Michael Ovitz to be groomed as the next
Disney heir to power, Ovitz was awarded a controversial $128
million severance package. [GRELLEY, Persp, p. B9; FISHER, M,
BAPTISTS, p. A1; MATZER, p. D8; HORN, p. 3; BURRESS, p. A1; CHICTRIB,
12-20-90, p1, 8; GUARDIAN, 12-4-96, 1, 19; BURRESS, p. E1; BRAXTON, p. F2;
MILLER, p. A1; LIEBERMAN, D, USA, p. B3; FARHI, p. D1, SLATER p. 298, 327;
SEGAL, N, p. 5]
(In the 1990s the
Disney-ABC conglomerate began buying up and gentrifying
Manhattan's Times Square area. All the low-life adult bookstores and other
such merchants were shifted, en masse, to another area. And who was
positioned to sell the real estate in the newly designated porno site? "Just
about the whole neighborhood," noted London's Daily Telegraph, "it
turned out, was owned by half-a-dozen old Jewish families.") [LAURENCE, C.,
10-30-95, p. 17]
In 1992, the
Disney film "Aladdin" came under attack from outraged Arab and Muslim
groups. Condemnation starts with its opening song: "Oh, I come from a land /
a far away place / where the caravan camels roam. / Where they cut off your
ear if they don't like your face / it's barbaric, but, hey, it's home." [SHAHEEN,
J. 12-21-92, p. F3] Professor Jack Shaheen complained again about Disney
four years later:
"Nearly one year
after Disney bashed Arabs in 'Aladdin,' ...
[its] studio
executives promised they would in the future consult with Arab Americans
so as not to repeat the mistakes. Soon after, in 'The Return of
Jafar' (1996), they displayed gobs of hook-nosed Arabs referred to
in the film as 'desert skunks.' That same year, Disneycontinued trouncing
Arabs in ... 'In the Army Now' ... In 1995,
Disney's
Christmas feel-good family film 'Father of the Bride, Part II, writers
inserted a foul, rich, Arab-American couple, the Habibs... Collectively,
Disney's relentlessly ruthless images advance suspicion
and hatred.
Although other studios perpetuate injurious clichés ... only Disney
violates Americans of Middle East heritage." SHAHEEN, J.,
8-12-96, p. F31]
This anti-Arab,
anti-Islam tenor, of course, is a recurring theme from Hollywood. In 1998,
for instance, a non-Disney film, The Siege, by director
Edward Zwick, came under especially heated attack by Arabs and Muslims. From
the apologetic side, "Zwick and [Siege producer Lynda] Obst, both
Jewish, have said that they intended the 20th Century Fox film
to combat racism." [PFEFFERMAN, N., 9-4-98] The American Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee strongly felt it did something else, calling
it "insidious, incendiary, and dangerous" for Arabs and Muslims. "There is
no doubt," agreed Montreal Gazette reviewer Bill Brownstein, "...
that The Siege does incite racial hatred toward Arabs ... The image
that will linger long after the lights come back on is that of U.S. soldiers
herding up every Arab in New York and shunting them off to
mini-concentration camps." [BROWNSTEIN, B., p. A3]

In 2000, London's daily newspaper The
Independent noted the new movie Rules of Engagement, directed by
William Friedkin and produced by Paramount, whose head of the film division
is Sherry Lansing. Friedkin and Lansing are husband and wife -- and they are
both Jewish:

"The Arab nations -- and the Islamic world in general -- have become
the new
stock enemy, a powerful and unreasoning force in True Lies
(1994), Executive
Decision
(1995), GI Jane (1997) and The Siege (1998) -- in which Bruce
Willis
rounded up Arab Americans in an attempt to stop a Hezbollah-type
terrorist
group blowing up New York. Even The Insider (1999) -- a film
about corruption
in the tobacco industry, for heaven's sake -- tacked on a Syrian
prologue in which Al
Pacino took on a pack of mad-ish mullahs. And Rules of Engagement?
This film is absolutely off the scale,' says Hussein Ibish,
communications director of the
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Commitee, a Washington-based pressure
group. 'I've never seen anything quite so vile. I felt like I was being
physically
beaten, which is a reaction I've never had encountering a work of art.
It was
mind-bogglingly vicious. I'm amazed that a major American entertainment
company
would actually release such a thing." [SWEET, M., 7-30-00]
In 1999, the
Disney company found itself embroiled in yet another controversy, this
one political. It had allowed the state of Israel to have an exhibit -- the
largest -- "on display at the new Millennium Village at [Disney World]
Complex's Epcot Center in Florida." [LOS ANGELES JEWISH TIMES, Aug 27-Sept
2, 99] Muslim and Arab organizations were concerned that Israel would
portray Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state, an assertion at odds
with the Muslim and Arab view.
Rarely publicly
expressed, there may be an angry undercurrent in popular perception about
the reshaping of Disney's public image: a perceived negative
Jewish influence in the mass media's shaping of modern American values, a
theme which is not new. "During Hollywood's pre-second World War Golden
Age," notes J. J. Goldberg," it was commonly argued that Jews were
insensitive and hostile to Christian values and were shaping an American
culture that offended the American Christian majority." [GOLDBERG, p. 284]
In later years even Jewish authors could be found who complained about a
noticeable shift in media-defined American values. "A distinct majority of
[producers and writers in Hollywood] are Jewish," wrote Jewish critic Ben
Stein, "They do not hold criminals responsible for crime but rather place
the blame on society." [PRAGER, p. 63]
"There may be
something more serious behind these boycotts [against Disney],
Lehrer [an Anti-Defamation League official] and others suspect," says Joel
Kotkin, "a revival of the traditional concerns among various groups about
'Jewish control' of the means of mass communications. Disney
['s] ... leadership comprises some of the most visible and powerful Jewish
figures in the industry." [KOTKIN, DISNEY, p. 12]
In protesting the
Disney-ABC TV series "Nothing Sacred' (which has extremely low
ratings, yet was renewed for a second season anyway), the president of the
Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, William Donohue, noted in
1997 that
"Perhaps the most
aggravating aspect of 'Nothing Sacred' is the
audacity of
executive producers David Manson and Richard Kramer,
to admit that
their purpose is to create 'dialogue among Catholics' about the teachings of
the Church. Who ever asked -- or appointed -- these
two men, both of
whom are Jewish, and both who believe in nothing, to foment dialogue
in my Church? .... 'Nothing Sacred' is political
propaganda against
the Magisterium being waged by producers who are outsiders."
[DONOHUE]
In 1999, a
Disney affiliate, Miramax Films, produced yet another
Catholic-bashing movie, Dogma, "Kevin Smith's controversial satire of
Roman Catholicism." [GEIER, T., 11-13-99] The Catholic League for Religious
and Civil Rights claimed to have garnered 300,000 signatures in protest of
the film. The Miramax Jewish co-chairmen, Bob and Harvey
Weinstein, eventually "personally bought back" the movie from its parent
company and forwarded distribution rights to another firm, Lion's
Gate (co-presidents also Jewish: Mark Urman and Tom
Ortenberg).
In 1992 the Jewish
film critic and talk show host, Michael Medved, was taken aside by an
unnamed” best-selling author" and "popular television commentator" at a
"media accountability" conference for a heart to heart talk. "What I don't
get," the unnamed Gentile said, "when I look at Hollywood, is why is it that
so many of the people who are responsible for the worst garbage turn out to
be Jews? It's sort of become an obvious question, but nobody likes to talk
about it, because nobody wants to sound like a bigot ... How come they're so
set on trashing everything that the rest of us care about? I'm afraid we've
got more and more people out there who are wondering about the same thing."
[MEDVED, p. 315]
"To hear this
sophisticated and dynamic public figure draw a connection between Jewish
involvement in Hollywood and the current degradation in Hollywood," says
Medved, "hit me with the force of a blow to the chest. No one could ever
accuse him of anti-Semitism; for many years he had compiled an admirable
record of service to Jewish causes and he'd made several trips to Israel."
[MEDVED, p. 315, p. 70] (Jewish assault on non-Jewish and Christian values
is an old theme. In 1927, Bishop Joseph Schrembs of Cleveland, remarking on
the pornography, prostitution, and general mass media trades, noted the
"large and influential group of Jews who are attempting to break down
Christian morality. Let us go to the decent Jews -- and thanks be to God
there are decent Jews and lots of them -- and ask them to join hands with us
to solve the common problem of commercialized vice." [FRIEDMAN, A., 2000, p.
142]
Hollywood movies and
television at-large have been increasingly attacked in recent years for
propagating a range of decadent values. 82% of Americans
polled in a 1989 Associated Press/Media General survey felt that today's
movies had too much violence, 80% felt there was too much profanity, and 72%
too much nudity. 72% of a Parents magazine survey supported
prohibition "against making fun of religion" in the mass media. A 1991
Gallup poll showed that 58% of Americans were "offended frequently or
occasionally" by prime-time programming. A 1989 Time/CNN survey documented
that 67% of the American public believes the violence in movies was "mainly
to blame" for rising teenage violence; 70% supported "greater restraints on
the showing of sex and violence" in the movies. [MEDVED, Hollywood,
p. 4] In the 1992 Presidential election both Bill
Clinton and Robert Dole criticized Hollywood for glorifying drugs.
In 1999 the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the
Office of National Drug Control Policy released the results of a joint
report that studied the content of the top movie rentals and 1,000 most
popular songs of 1996-99. 98% of the films and 27% of the songs "contained
reference to either alcohol or drugs, 26% of movies portrayed illicit drug
use in a humorous context." [OLDENBERG, p. 8B] And in a 2000 report, the
Federal Trade Commission "accused the entire [entertainment industry] of
aggressively selling violent and sexually explicit films, video games and
music to kids." [MSNBC, 4-24-01]
"That this [film and
TV] industry," says Michael Medved, "more firmly associated with Jews than
any other business in the world, is almost universally viewed as a
destructive force in our society should be viewed with concern." [MEDVED, p.
42] Not even focusing on the Hollywood world, in 1999,
Rabbi Daniel Lapin wrote an extraordinarily unusual, and stunning, appraisal
of the collective negative effects of the modern Jewish community upon the
values of America:
"My firm conviction is
that we must engage in an honest exploration of the problems and
shortcomings of the Jewish community and Jewish communal leadership.
Instead of focusing on imagined enemies, we should ask whether
dogmatic commitment to a secular-liberal vision is encouraging dislike
for the Jewish community. Without such honest self-appraisal, Jews
will become more and more disliked -- not by crazed individuals but
by decent Americans distressed over their rapidly deteriorating
culture and the role of Jews in that agenda. It cannot escape the
notice of ordinary Americans coping with the
challenge of raising
responsible children in a hostile world that many Jewish names and
groups lead the fight for policies these Americans see as causing the
country's decline." [LAPIN, D., 1999, p. 42]
Jewish-dominated
Hollywood and its movie and music world has always been a hotbed for all
sorts of vices, including drugs. All sorts of people partake in these
realms, and there can be created long lists of Tinseltown drug addicts and
dealers, of course, but Jews are to be found -- as in so many fields --
profoundly disproportionate in them (Jewish mobster Arnold Rothstein, in the
early 20th century, is even credited by some with beginning the syndicated
drug trade in America). As early as the 1930s, actress
Lana Turner notes her surprise at the drug interest of her Jewish husband,
famous band leader Artie Shaw:
"When I came back
Artie and Phil [Silvers, a well-known Jewish
comedian] were
smoking what they called 'reefers.' I'd heard of marijuana, of course,
but I'd never seen it before. It was associated mainly with jazz
musicians. Artie and Phil offered me some, and I said no." [TURNER,
L., 1982, p. 58] In more recent years
cocaine has become an especially popular Hollywood drug. In 1974
Paramount Pictures' head of production Robert Evans was replaced,
largely because of his continuous problem with cocaine. In 1980 he was
convicted for cocaine possession. [MCDOUGAL, p. 393, WICK, S., 87] In 1982
Jewish actor Richard Dreyfus "was arrested and charged with possession of
cocaine and 31 tablets of Percodan." [WOODWARD, 1984, p. 418] Likewise, in
the 1990s actor Robert Downey, Jr. spent a year in prison for drug abuse. In
an extreme case, in 1983 Hollywood agent Roy Radin, also Jewish, was found
murdered, a result of his involvement in a drug ring. [WICK, p. 144] Radin,
" a six-foot, three-inch, 300-pound cocaine addict ... made a fortune
producing traveling vaudeville shows for Police Benevolent Associations
across the country. 'The Roy Radin Review,' as it was called, headlined the
likes of Georgie Jessel and Tiny Tim ... [Radin] sometimes took 75 percent
of the proceeds." [GAINES, S., 1998, p. 246] Radin, notes singer Eddie
Fisher, "was the sleaziest person I"d ever known. He was guzzling cocaine."
[FISHER, E., 1999, p. 312] Bert Schneider's and Bob Rafelson's film
BBS company "ethic was the raucous parties, with bags of dope and bowls
of coke openly displayed on coffee tables." [MCGILLIGAN, 1994, p. 202]
Rachel Abramowitz
notes the post-1960s elite that has come to rule Hollywood:
"[Executives Paula]
Weinstein and [Mark] Rosenberg and their radical
friends typified the
leftists with the cause manqué who poured into
Hollywood from the
[political] battlefields of Columbia and Stanford, ready to take on life
on the studio expense account. Unlike their
forebears, they
weren't self-made scrappers but tended to be well-tended
progeny of the
upper-middle class with down-home hippie roles ... They
drank Perrier, did
coke and grass [cocaine and marijuana] ... Paula
Weinstein was one of
the new breed of Hollywood executives ... [Their] intoxicants were
cocaine and work." [ABRAMOWITZ, R., 2000, p.
79, 134]
In 1991, Jewish
academy award-winning film producer Julia Phillips (among her products:
The Sting, Taxi Driver, Close Encounters of the Third Kind)
wrote an autobiographical book about her life in the upper echelons of
Hollywood movie making. Here are some snippets from her
expose about her experiences in the behind-the-scenes real-life world of
Tinseltown that makes America's movies and molds popular culture, helping
towards an answer, perhaps, to the question 'Where does Hollywood's
on-screen interest in drugs come from?’:
*
"[Backstage at a Rolling Stones concert at Madison Square Garden]
there is a smelly
Israeli named Freddie who seems to be very important to everybody. He
carries two medium sized bottles filled with rock cocaine. He offers
some to Goldie [Hawn] and some to me. Fuck
you, Mr.
Under-Assistant West Coast Promo Man. We turn him down;
I've got my own."
[PHILLIPS, p. 197]
*
"Our little baby [is] asleep innocently in another room while we, two
smart New York Jews,
are imbibing in [heavy drugs]." [PHILLIPS,
p.235]
* "Jack Spratlin is a
middle-echelon Hollywood drug dealer ... [He] is an acid casualty. He
was meant to be one thing -- an upwardly mobile street Jew from New
York who came to Hollywood to be an agent
and a luminary -- but
he became another because of drugs." [PHILLIPS, p. 235]
* "I let Spratlin
fuck me from behind in the closet in front of the mirror just before I leave
for the morning." [PHILLIPS, p. 327]
* "The seductive
thing about freebase, for me anyway, is that at first I have the illusion
that I am doing substantially less cocaine than if I
toot it ... I learn a
rough [drug] recipe from a nice Jewish dealer in
the Valley."
[PHILLIPS, p. 358]
* "One morning
Rottweiler wakes up in bed in a bad mood. We've run out of blow the
night before and he's down downed himself out with
Quaaludes. Like all
male junkies, he uses dope as a reason not to bathe. Like all
Jewish girls, there is nothing in the world to keep
me from a daily
shower and shampoo. Not even freebase." [PHILLIPS,
p. 358]
* "I actually smoke
freebase in the hospital, right up to the abortion." [PHILLIPS, p. 376]
* "I sleep with
Michael Brandon, but I do a taste of this and that as sexual aids.
Basically, I mix Quaaludes and Atvion and pot ... Upon awakening the next
morning, I look at him and he is cute, but I surprise both of us
by bursting into terrible heaving sob/tears. Being Jewish and funny,
Michael defends himself with some pretty good jokes." [PHILLIPS,
p. 453]
Ned Wynn (of partial
Jewish heritage: actor, screenwriter, and son of comedian Keenan Wynn),
recalls his first encounter with cocaine in the Hollywood world, thanks to
singer Cass Elliot (born Ellen Naomi Cohen):
"I had been
introduced to cocaine by Cass Elliot, the lead female
singer with the Mamas
and the Papas. An enormous woman of
appetites yet
unfathomed, Cass had literally chased me around at a party John had
taken me to one night. She had cornered me and actually spooned
coke into my nose. Caught like a rabbit in the glare of Cass's
eyeballs, I wrinkled and twitched and snorted and lit up like a
little light bulb. Cass, you dog. I was in." [WYNN, N., 1990, p. 199]
In 1995, Marvin
Shick wrote an article in the Jewish Week, saying that:
"Much has been made
of the abundance of high-profile Jews in the lower-depths of the
entertainment industry. While it won't do to simply say it ain't so,
for it is, ... I do not feel especially guilty because
of the
wrongful behavior
of certain Jews, whether they are secular sleaze merchants or
chasidim ... But I am embarrassed, even hurt, when
wrongdoers are
honored, which happens too often in our fervid world
of organizations
and fund raising. It is my understanding that in
Hollywood
'humanitarian' awards are handed out promiscuously, with Jewish
organizations well in the lead ... It's ... a mistake for our community to
have so little to say about the cultural depravity all around us ... It is
insufficient for us to act like a community of amateur constitutional
lawyers whenever someone shouts 'First Amendment' to protect the
cesspool of moral corruption." [SCHICK, p. 5]
Jewish film critic
Steve Walz noted with concern the rise of violently and morally reckless
"teenager films" in the late 1990s. "The most controversial teen flick [Cruel
Intentions]," he observes, has "several Jewish and half-Jewish stars,
writers, producers, etc. involved in this flick, which basically depicts
wicked teenagers trying to bed each other based on vicious dares ... Teenage
crime figures are on the rise and anyone who tells you that there ISN'Ta direct correlation between what teens see on the big
screen or small screen and their anti-social relations is a flat out liar."
[WALZ, 3-1-98] The plot of Cruel Intentions, noted the Los Angeles
Times, "revolves around a rich New York City high school girl who snorts
cocaine from her crucifix and bets her stepbrother he can't deflower a
certain virgin. She offers him sexual relations with her as the prize, if he
wins." [JENSEN, E., p. F1]
Jews
in fact have a long history of testing the limits of popular morality and
exploring sexuality's potential for profitability. They dominated the early
1900s vaudeville scene and were prominent in the development of the
striptease as entertainment, as part as the package known as burlesque ("the
most sexualy suggestive and sexually explicit of all of New York's popular
media"). [FREIDMAN, A., 2000, p. 62] After all, as an
earlier chapter evidences, and as Yale professor Donald Davis phrases it,
"the Jewish pimps and vice lords ... dominated the white slave trade traffic
and its 'sex industry' in the early twentieth century." [DAVIS, D., p. 29]
"Jewish male comics," also notes Andrea Most, "regularly appeared in
drag on the Broadway and vaudeville stage." [MOST, A., 1999, p. 322]

In the early to mid-20th century, a
number of anti-vice organizations sought to curtail some trends in the New
York entertainment industry, which was largely Jewish. (Sometimes
underscoring ethnic/religious undercurrents, these included expressly
Catholic organizations like the Legion of Decency and the National
Organization for Decent Literature). "New York's position as the nation's
cultural mecca," notes Andrea Friedman, "and the important role played by
entertainment industries in the city's economy, made the conflicts over
obscenity that occured there unique in their importance to municipal life
... The substantial role played by Jews in New York's entertainment
industries made debates about obscenity especially important to many Jewish
leaders." [FRIEDMAN, A., 2000, p. 10] In 1942, New York City refused to
renew city burlesque theatre licenses, shutting them all down. [FRIEDMAN,
A., 2000, p. 62] "Jews," notes Jewish scholar Friedman,

"were also well represented among New York's theatrical producers, and
burlesque
in particular was notable for the presence of Jews among producers,
managers, and
entertainers ... The visibility of Jews in these industries nourished
Christian
fears that commercial culture in the metropolis would become even more
corrupt and corrupting than it already was. Their association with an
entertainment
world built around the commodification of sexuality seeemed to sustain
a
preexisting paradigm of antisemitism that fused prejudices regarding
Jewish greed and sexual immorality in the conviction, as historian
Edward
Bristow had phrased it, that Jews 'organized widespread conspiracies to
corrupt and pollute the Christian world.' In the United States, as in
Europe,
many Christians subscribed to the view that Jews were so avaricious
that they would permit neither legalities nor morals to stand in their
way
of their accumulation of wealth." [FRIEDMAN, A., 2000 , p. 141]

Friedman also notes the main reason for eventual Jewish religious
activism in some anti-obscenity groups -- fears of anti-Semitism:

"Some of New York's Jewish religious leaders also became more vocal in
debates |
about obscenity during the 1920s and 1930s. To a greater degree
than Protestants and Catholics, however, their participation came in
response as much
to the existence of anti-obscenity campaigns as to the existence of
obscenity. Rabbis
entered into anti-obscenity activism in the attempt to counter
Christians'
perceptions of Jews as a different, alien, and more primitive people,
by
demonstrating that they shared the 'Christian' morals of their
Protestant
and Catholic brethren and by trying to control the behavior of other
Jews.
Prompted by the concern that Christian condemnations of obscenity
might fuel antisemitism (and vice versa), they sometimes joined in such
condemnations in self-defense. For Jews, anti-obscenity activism became
a
strategy for protecting the Jewish community by policing it."
[FRIEDMAN, A.,
2000, p. 140-141]The most famous
stripper of all time, Gypsy Rose Lee (real name: Rose
Louise Hovick) was Jewish, as was her early forum -- Minsky's Theatre (of
"The Night They Raided Minsky's" fame). The theatre founders were Abe and
Billy Minsky, grandsons of the chief rabbi of the Russian city of Minsk.
Another Minsky, Herbert, was the "maestro of burlesque." [COOPER, p. 42]
(The Minsky's New Gotham Burlesque House was raided on April 8, 1937, and
its Jewish manager, Sam Kraus, jailed. Other Minsky venues included the
Republic and Oriental Burlesque sites. As Jay Maeder observes, "New Gotham
operator Abe Minsky was one of numerous Minsky brothers who had largely
cornered the stripper business in New York." Jewish "civil rights" lawyer
Morris Ernst declared that the raid was a "step in the direction of
fascism.") [MAEDER, J., 6-26-2000] Elsewhere in New York City, among many
other Jewish madams, was "Polly Adler, the Polish-born madam of New York's
most famous bordello of the 1920s and 1930s." [MCDOUGAL, p. 92] A little
earlier, "the most famous madam in turn-of-the century New York was Rosie
Hertz. Saving enough from her own prostitution, she and her husband, Jacob,
opened several brothels on the Lower East Side during the 1880s ... The
epitome of the 'white slaver,' Hertz was called by one judge the 'godmother
for prostitutes.' Another critic considered her 'as much a public feature of
the lower East Side ... as the Brooklyn Bridge." [GILFOYLE, T., 1992, p.
295]
Dallas, Texas? When
Jack Ruby (Rubenstein) murdered Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963, he owned the
Carousel, a local strip tease joint. As Gerald Posner notes, "Ruby's main
competition was from the Theatre and Colony Clubs, owned by two brothers,
Abe and Barney Weinstein. In 1961, they had introduced amateur strip-tease
dancing." [POSNER, p. 362] Atlanta, Georgia? By 1999, owner Steve Kaplan's
Gold Club "nude dancing" business had been "indicted on federal racketeering
charges that included prostitution, credit card fraud, money laundering,
police corruption and ties to the Gambino organized crime family." His
lawyer, Alan Begner, was also Jewish. "Since 1982," noted the Atlanta
Journal and Constitution, "Begner has carved a lucrative niche as a
lawyer of adult entertainment establishments," representing about half of
the 45 in metropolitan Atlanta. "I knock out laws," he explained to the
newspaper. Begner's interest in strip joints began when another Jewish owner
(Emmanual Isaacs of the "She Club") asked him to represent him. [RANKIN, B.,
12-5-99, p. 2D]

The Associated Press further noted in 2001 that Gold Club
owner Steven Kaplan (club manager: Norbert Calder) was

"accused of building a $50 million fortune in part by providing
prostitutes
for celebrities. Atlanta's Gold Club is one of the most profitable nude
clubs
in the country, popular among convention-goers and visiting
celebrities.
Federal investigators say it is also a high-priced brothel that pumps
cash into
the Gambino crime family ... [The Federal indictment against Kaplan]
says
Kaplan ordered more than 20 beatings of people who did not repay loans
at high rates of interest." [COURT TV, 4-2001]

The most famous "sex club" in history (prospering in the 1970s and
1980s before the AIDS epidemic) is probably Plato's Retreat, based in New
York City. Its owner was also Jewish: Larry Levenson. As Jewish scholar
David Allyn describes it:

"First of all, you have to picture the Ansonia Hotel, which is a late
19th century
wedding-cake of a building in the heart of the upper west side in New
York. In
the basement of the Ansonia was Plato's Retreat, then the world's most
famous
sex club. Men and women would stroll about the Ansonia lobby in nothing
but
towels. In the club, they would have sex with possibly a dozen or so
people
in a single night. Plato's Retreat represented the commercial version
of what was
happening in people's apartments and living rooms across the country."
[BOOKMARK, 2000]

In the early movie
world, seminal Jewish "vamp" film actress Theda Bara "scandalized the mores
of the middle-classes ... Local boards issued edicts condemning her films."
[HYMAN, p. 118-119] "The first sex symbol [Bara] in movie history," says M.
H. Goldberg, "was Jewish. (It is interesting to note that two other sex
symbols in movie history -- Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor -- converted
to Judaism.)" [GOLDBERG, H. M., 1976, p. 166] A little earlier, Anna Held,
of Polish Jewish descent, celebrated a "naughty French persona" in the
Ziegfield Follies and "was an early icon" of "America's burgeoning cult of
celebrity at the turn of the century." [LAVITT, P., 2000, p. 263, 268]
Vienna-born Jewish actress Hedy Lamarr (Hedwig Kiesler) pushed mores in the
movie world with the European film Ecstasy (1933), featuring partial
nudity and daringly new degrees of eroticism. The film was banned in the
U.S. till 1940.
In the early years of
the 20th century, Sholom Asch's play "God of Vengeance" was performed in New
York in Yiddish and then in English off-Broadway without incident. "Asch's
tale centers on Yankel, a Jew who runs a shady downstairs brothel with his
ex-whore wife, yet is obsessed with protecting the chastity and piety of his
young daughter." When the play was finally performed to a broader public on
Broadway, it was "shut down by New York police, a landmark censorship case
... The actors, producer, and owner of the Apollo Theatre" were all arrested
and their court trial became "the first jury conviction of American
entertainers charged with presenting 'immoral' fare." Variety
magazine called the play "the most disgusting play every presented on
Broadway." [BERSON, M., 4-2-2000]
Cartoon character
Betty Boop? The Fleischer brothers, Max and Dave, notes Amelia Holberg,
"created and
controlled one of the great 30s sex symbols, animated
Betty Boop. Betty's
cartoons, remembered vividly for their overt
sexuality and often
grotesque imagery, are even more provocative when viewed in
relation to the lives of her working-class Eastern
European immigrant,
Jewish creators ... Betty's initial disappearance
can be traced to the
Hays Production Code Office, which determined
Betty Boop to be too
racy for general audiences in 1934." [HOLBERG,
A., 1999, p.
290-291]

[Chaim Bermant notes a little more about Will Hays and the tearing
down of popular mores: "The Jewish dominance of Hollywood did not, of
course, pass without comment. By the end of World War I it became clear that
the cinema was becoming, if it had not already become, the supreme influence
in the cultural life of America, affecting its tastes, its habits, its
outlook. There was a growing clamour -- to quote the words of one
influential pressure group -- 'to rescue the motion pictures from the hands
of the Devil and five hundred un-Christian Jews.' To defend themslves
against such criticism, Mayer, Laemmle, Goldwyn and the other un-Christian
Jews grouped themselves into the Motion Pictures Prodducers and Distributors
of America Inc., and invited Will H. Hayes to preside over them. In doing so
they were not merely attempting to buy-off criticism, they were buying
respectability."] [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 102]

The Fleischer brothers also created Popeye, and
many other characters in the 1930s. In fact, "Jews represent 80 percent of
the pioneers and leaders of the comic book industry." [GOLDBERG, M. H.,
1979, p. 118] In the molding of popular American culture, Mad
magazine (publisher: William Gaines. Editors Al Feldstein and Harvey
Kurtzman. All Jewish. Kurtzman formerly worked for the communist paper the
Daily Worker.) [HEILBRUNN J., 6-01] Mad's "most popular artists" were
also Jewish: Mort Drucker and Al Jaffee. [GOODWIN, G., 2001, p. 159] Mad
magazine was influential in creating a new kind of adolescent.
"Americans of Jewish background," note Stanley Rothman and S. Robert
Lichter,

"developed a direct and important influence on adolescents and even
pre-
adolescents in othe ways. Starting in the 1950s, Mad Magazine
developed
wide popularity among this group, and, as Marie Winn had pointed out,
it played a significant role in 'the move toward free expression among
children; its relentless exposure of parental dishonesty caused shock
waves and reaction among its young readers.' From the beginningMad's editors have been Jewish and, as they themselves would
agree,
hostile to the American civic myth." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982,
p. 108]

Joe Shuster and Jerome Siegel created Superman. Bob Kane created
Batman; Stan Lee created Spiderman and The Hulk. Jewish all. [ETKES/STADTMAUER,
1995, p. 128] Stan "the Man" Lee "revived Marvel Comics. He invented
the superhero as anti-hero ... A 1965 college poll conducted by Esquire ...
revealed that student radicals ranked Spider-Man and the Hilk alongside the
likes of Bob Dylan [also Jewish] and Che Guevara as their favorite
revolutionary icons ... The outsider hero had arrived as the most celebrated
figure in youth culture, and Marvel had him." [HEILBRUNN, J., 6-01] Head of
DC comics (Superman, et al)? Also Jewish: Jenette Kahn (1998).

The Jewish Forward noted the Jewish dimension to the comics
world and the blockbuster movie Spiderman in 2002:

"Sure, Spiderman's great. He's a nebbish who happens to have
super-human
powers. He's got radioactive blood, he detects trouble with his Spider
sense,
he catches thieves just like flies, all while smashing box-office
records by taking
in $114 million his first weekend as a movie star. According to Dan
Raviv,
however, the real heroes of Marvel Comics are the two Israeli men at
the
company's helm, Isaac (Ike) Perlmutter and Avi Arad.
In this real-life drama,
they're the two little guys who wrestled Marvel away from sparring
billionaires, transforming a bankrupt company into a highly profitable
one. Exactly how
two underdogs beat seasoned tycoons at their own game is the kind of
fairy
tale that movies are made of, and it makes for interesting reading in
Raviv's
latest book, 'Comic Wars: How Two Tycoons Battled Over the Marvel
Comics Empire and Both Lost' (Broadway Books). The good guys are the
immigrant owners of a small toy company — albeit one with exclusive
rights
to license Marvel toys. And the bad guys are two titans of finance:
Ronald
Perelman, the Revlon chief and takeover artist who ran Marvel into
bankruptcy,
and corporate predator Carl Icahn [both Perelman and Icahn are
also Jewish]
— a model for Michael Douglas's character in 'Wall Street' — who
attempted
a hostile takeover. In the end the Israelis, predicting the Marvel
superheroes'
ability to jump from comic book pages to the silver screen,
unexpectedly seized control of the company ... The story of Marvel is
a Jewish one indeed. Founded
in 1939 by Martin Goodman, Marvel was a part of the so-called
"golden age"
of comics, when hordes of young Jewish writers and artists, most of
them
struggling immigrants' sons, created armies of imaginary superheroes
like
Superman and Captain America, whose mission was to wage war against
Nazis
and their ilk. At Marvel in particular, the key players throughout the
decades,
including Jacob Kurtzberg and Stanley Lieber — better
known as Jack Kirby
and Stan Lee, the creators of the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man in the
early 1960s
— have been almost exclusively Jewish." [KEYS, L., 5-10-2002]

Cartoonists Jules Feiffer, Al Capp (the author of L'il Abner;
Capp's original name was Alfred Gerald Caplin), Herblock (Herb Bloch), Ralph
Bakshi, Rube Goldberg, illustrator Maurice Sendak, Shel Silverstein, Nicole
Hollander, and many others are also Jewish. Isador (Fritz)Freleng was the
"creator of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety Pie, Speedy Gonzalez,
and the Pink Panther." [ETKES/STADTMAUER, 1995, p. 128] "To my mind," says
Stan Sulkes, echoing legend about Jewish history, "no one is more Jewish
than Bugs Bunny. Or more resourceful. Surrounded by enemies, he survived by
his wits, thwarting all the Elmer Fudds of this world unwilling to let him
live in peace. Happily, I'm not alone in that view. Another transplanted New
Yorker recognizes Bugs' ethnicity too. 'It was no accident,' observes David
Gilner, director of Libraries for Hebrew Union College, 'that his animator
was Fritz Feleng, and his voice supplied by Mel Blanc -- both of whom were
Jewish." [SULKES, S., 4-21-97]

A former major in the Israeli army reserves, Ranan Lurie (now living
in the United States) is the "world's most syndicated political cartoonist;"
he is featured in 106 countries and 1,100 newspapers. [LIEBENSON, p. 13CN,
21] Betty Cohen even is president today of the Cartoon Network, the cable TV
channel that has 60 million subscribers in 144 countries throughout the
world. [POLLAK, S., 1-7-00]

Cartoonist Albert Hirschfeld (who once worked for the communist magazine
The Masses) has appeared, for over seven decades, "frequently and
prominently on the pages of the New York Times. He has published
several cofee-table volumes, and a Manhattan gallery, Margo Feiden, deals
exclusively with his drawings and limited edition prints ... Twice during
the 1990s he received commissions for postage stamps." Will Eisner "made an
important name for himself both as the father of his own comic strip and as
developer of 'instructional' comics." His company, American Visuals, has
contracted for organizations as diverse as the Girl Scouts and the American
Dental Association. [GOODWIN, G., 2001, p. 151, 154]

In the 1950s, the Jewish-dominated
comic book industry raised familiar issues -- public concern that they were
influential in the degradation of popular morals and values. In 1955-56 the
U.S. Senate held investigations into the matter, releasing a report entitled
"Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency." The Senate document noted that

"on first impression, the present comic book industry would seem to
comprise
many different publishing firms with no apparent relationship to one
another ... On
closer scruutiny, however it is found that the picture is entirely
different ... The
676 comic book titles [that were examined] are published by 111
companies
owned by only 121 persons or families in addition to 1 corporation ...
The
majority of the publishers maintain editorial offices in New York
City."
[U.S. Senate, 1955-56]

Subsections of the report included "Techniques of Crime Taught by Crime
and Horror Comics," "Criminal Careers as Glamorous in Crime and Horror Comic
Books, and "Defenders of Law and Order [Are] Frequently Represented as All
Powerful Beings Who Kill and Commit Other Crimes to Defend 'Justice.'"
Jewish comic book entrepreneurs who are singled out by the report include
direct-mail advertiser Samuel Roth "who has for many years been engaged in
using the mail to advertise lewd and lascivious material," and Alex Segal
who "testifed that 'by mistake' one of his trays of addressograph plates
bearing the names of 400 children was routed to the publisher of sex
literature." In the listings of owners and distributors of comic book
businesses, among the best known are Marvel Comic group (owners: Martin and
Jean Goodman) and Archie Comic Group (owners: Maurice Coyne, John Goldwater,
and Lewis H. Silberkleit). [U.S. SENATE, 1955-56]

Mad magazine's William Gaines also produced "the greatest of
the under-the-covers-with-a-flashlight genre." These comics, featuring new
explorations of gore, include Tales from the Crypt, Weird Science,
Shock Suspensestories, Frontline Combat,

"and a few other titles [that] made the struggling company profitable
and Gaines a
fully employed pop culture mentor of the first magnitude. But this
upstart Jewish
kid was soon put out of business by a crusading psychiatrist from the
old country,
a nasty bunch of Senators, and a coalition of PTA and American Legion,
sheriffs
and bishops, editors and aldermen. The Comics Code that was created to
deflect
the heat couldn't help Gaines. The slander was so thorough that his
books were
returned unopened by retailers even after the Code seal was applied.
By the end
of 1954, after just a four year run, the EC [Gaines' company] comics
were all gone,
except for the satirical Mad." [TEBBEL, J., 1999]

As Jacob Heilbrunn notes, in a review of a book about comic books by
scholar Bradford W. Wright,

"EC comics offered something of a precursor to the upheaval of the
1960s,
questioning authority before it became fashionable to question
anything. In perhaps
the most notorious panel printed by EC comics, a murderous baseball
team
plays a midnight game with the limbs and entrails of a victim. Little
was left to the
imagination ... Another issue depicted a man hodling a bloody ax in one
hand and a
woman's severed head in the other. 'Corpses in various states of decay
and reanimation,' Wright says, 'regularly adorned the covers.' 'A
commercial expression of cultural
defiance ,' he writes, 'EC brilliantly perceived the alienated
generation among
young people and recognized youth dissatisfaction as a marketable
commodity.'
The reaction came quickly. By 1948, Catholic schools were conducting
bonfires
of comic books ... Soon enough, William M. Gaines, the publisher of EC,
found
himself facing off against a Senate investigative committtee headed by
Estes
Kefauver. It was a rout. Kefauver delcared that a panel in the July
issue 'seems
to be a man with a woman in a boat and he is choking her to death with
a crowbar.
Is that in good taste?' 'I think so,' was all Gaines could answer." [HEIBRUNN,
J.,
6-01]
Moving along in the Jewish influence
world, even the nightclub business, says Kenneth Kanter, "was invented by a
Jew, Jack Levy." [KANTER, p. 38] Billy Rose, another Jewish entrepreneur,
was "a pioneer of nightclub entertainment. He opened in 1924 with a small
club for people of modest means, and he remained only modestly successful
till he built up the Diamond Horseshoe, which became the largest, plushiest
and most celebnrated establishment of its type and which was deciedly for
people of immodest means and even less modest taste. Here too the accent was
on glamour, with successive arrays of splendid women splendily
semi-attired." [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 90] [See elsewhere in this volume
discussions of Jewish ownership of everything from Club Med to the
Cotton Club]. Glasgow, Scotland? Stefan King ("half-Jewish and
half-Catholic") "opened Glasgow's first gay nightclub." [MULFORD, S., 2000,
p 35] "By 1920," adds Stephen Birmingham, "much of the
Prohibition liquor trade was in Jewish hands, and a good number of the
speakeasies and nightclubs where would-be stars could do their turns was
also Jewish owned." [BIRMINGHAM, p. 190]
In 1999, the
Village Voice interviewed Luke Ford, author of A History of X:
100 Years of Sex in Films and a convert, of all things, to Judaism. "Publishers
Weekly " Ford said, "took me to task for that
'offensive generalization' about Jews but it's true. The big machers [in the
pornography] industry are Jewish -- Steve Hirsch, Paul Fishbein (who runs
and publishes Adult Video News), and David Sturman, who owns
[production company] Sin City." [BUNN, March 3-9, 99]
Fishbein, notes the Los Angeles Times, is the "editor and
publisher of the Van Nuys-based trade magazine Adult Video News,
generally considered the authoritative guide to the $9 billion U.S. sex
business ... Fishbein became a [porn] industry spokesman and advocate, a
role he has retained to this day." [COLLINS, S., 7-8-99, p. C1]

As Jewish scholar Jay Gertzman notes: "David Hebditch and Nick Anning,
researching the pornography business in the mid-1980s, report that 'some
industry insiders claim that porn in the United States is essentially a
Jewish business.'" "If this is so," adds Gertzman, with a little spin
control for Jewish economic endeavors, "it is because Jews have for a very
long time cultivated the temperament and talents of the middlemen, and they
are proud of these abilities." [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 289]In his book, Ford
goes further, pointing to a strong Jewish influence across American culture
that helped swing open the doors to increased sexual permissiveness, an
overhaul of traditional moralities, and, ultimately, increased popular
tolerance of pornography, noting that
"Those who pushed
America to a more liberal view of sex were mainly
male non-Jewish Jews
(Jews alienated from Judaism and Jewish life as well as the
Christian culture embraced by a majority of Americans) including Samuel Roth
of the 1957 Supreme Court case [that tested laws concerning the
depiction of sexuality]; Grove Press publisher Barney Rossett; the
owner of Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias, and his father, Jack
Kahane, a Paris publisher and author of sexually explicit novels;
comedian Lenny Bruce; filmmakers Russ Meyer, David Friedman, and
Randy Metzger; Austrian psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich; Screw
publisher Al Goldstein; Eros publisher Ralph Ginzburg [Ginzburg served time
in prison on obscenity charges for his magazine
Eros; he later
became editor and publisher of Moneysworth)] [GREENBERG, M., p.
54; his publications Blue Ball and Intercourse
were mailed from the conservative Pennsylvania Dutch area: GERTZMAN,
J., 2000, p. 287] ]; publisher Edward Mishkin; Jack Valenti,
president of the
Motion Picture Association of America; defense lawyer
Stanley Fleishman;
Playboy playmate and Hugh Hefner's ex-lover Barbara Klein (aka Barbie
Benton); Hefner's personal secretary, Bobbie Arnstein; philosopher Herbert
Marcuse; psychologist Albert Ellis; authors Philip Roth, William
Styron, and Norman Mailer; and Supreme Court Justice Abe
Fortas. They carried on a hundred-year history of radical Jews
challenging the reigning order." [FORD, p. 21]
(Ford's above list,
however, is wrong on at least one count: William Styron isn't Jewish. It's
not hard to understand, however, where the error came from. As Truman Capote
once noted about Styron's presence in the Jewish literary establishment, "if
ever there was a goy Yid, it's Bill Styron.")
[VOLKMAN, p. 96]
Among those in Ford's
tally, after a "watershed" court case over obscenity, Barney Rosset's
Grove Press published, in 1959, D. H. Lawrence's
then-scandalous Lady Chatterly's Lover; Rosset also "precipitated
another censorship brouhaha in 1968 when Grove's
Evergreen Films imported the sexually explicit I am Curious
Yellow from Sweden." [BLACKWELL, E., 1973, p. 417] Among works published
by Kahane and Girodias that have become standards of literature were
controversial works by Henry Miller, and Lolita.

Samuel Roth is noteworthy in the pornography trade for many reasons.
Although some might portray him as a free speech hero, he pirated editions
of both James Joyce's Ulysses and D. H. Lawrence's Lady
Chatterly's Lover, to the protest of both the Joyce and Lawrence
estates. Imprisoned twice, 1937-1939 and 1957-61, Roth was labeled "the
dirtiest pig in the world" and "the louse of Lewisburg [prison]" [GERTZMAN,
J., 2000, p. 219] Roth in 1936 "received the most severe prison sentence
possible under the law for brazenly using the Postal Service to distribute
flagrantly obscene books ... Roth was the most often incarcerated, the most
feckless, and quite likely the most resourceful booklegger of his time,
challenging moral and legal authorities with a quixotic bravado." [GERTZMAN,
J., 1999, p. 22] Other "chief mail-order erotica dealers were Esar Levine
and Benjamin Rebhuhn." [GERTZMAN, J., p. 26] Both served prison terms on
obscenity charges. "Great 'art erotica' suppliers" included Jake Zeitlin,
Harry F. Marks, Ben Abramson, and David Moss. [GERTZMAN, J., 1999, p. 61]
Alleged Jewish porn pushers at a Congressional investigation of the New York
pornography system included Irving Klaw ("self-styled King of the Pin-ups"),
Edward Mishkin, and Abraham Rubin. [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 278] Martin Kamin
was a "supplier of of borderline erotica." [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p.
177] Other "offenders" in the erotica trade included Earl Marks, Solomon
Malkin, Alex Field, Henry Klein, Raymond Thomson, Al Picker, Joseph Seiffer,
Max Gottschalk, and David Moss. [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 31] Jewish erotica
book publishers included William Faro, Panurge, Falstaff ("Falstaff gave
special prominence to the work of Iwan Bloch," also Jewish, "the father of
sexology") [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 193], Robin Hood House, the American
Anthropological Society, American Ethnological Press, Jul-Mar, Julian, Risus,
Biblion Balzac, Pickwick, Parnassus Book Shops, Abbey, Allied Book, Emerson,
Pioneer and Franklin. [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 192-193]

Jewish scholar Jay Gertzman, whose own uncle's bookshop was once raided
in Philadelphia, [GERTZMAN, J., p. 287] notes that Jews built the "erotica"
book business in New York (the heart of American publishing) and that there
was an

"absence of any single ethnic group of erotica dealers in New York
City prior to
the Jewish presence ... In several cases, the erotica dealer's
relatives were business partners. One could trust uncles and brothers,
and possibly no one else ... The underground printing of many banned
erotic classics ... was the work of two brothers, Adolph and Rudolph
Loewinger; another pair, David and Jacob Brotman, was responsible for
a large part of the lubricious under-the-counter pamphlets and
paper-bound books [moral watchdog groups] decried as flagitious. Jack
Brussel, Sam Roth's partner at the start of the latter's career,
enlisted the aid of his first wife ... Benjamin Rebhuhn's office
manager was his nephew, and his wife was listed as director of the
Falstaff Press Inc. Esar Levine and his brother Benjamin, close friends
of the Rebhuhns, were editor and business manager, respectively, of
the Panurge Press." [GERTZMAN, J., p. 29, p. 30]

By 1939, according to a major anti-smut organization, the New York
Society for the Suppression of Vice, 28 of 32 people arrested that year in
New York City for obscenity-related law-breaking were Jewish (the number may
have been even higher: two of the 32 did not have their religion/ethnicity
listed. [These figures are cited by Gertzman, who accepts them as credible.
[GETZMAN, J., 2000, p. 29]

As Gertzman notes, in classical Jewish outsider-insider terms,

"Erotica dealers formed a tight-knit, and therefore persistent,
resourceful, and
resilently successful entity. They were easy to stigmatize as a group
[by non-Jews]
set apart from the majority, even if they had the same goals and
methods of doing
business as general book dealers. In New York at least, during the
period from
1880 to 1940, many were members of Jewish immigrant families. Jewish
erotica
dealers seem to have become prominent in the field soon after the
eastern
European immigrants began arriving in record numbers in 1880." [GERTZMAN,
J., p. 28]

The Jerusalem Post concluded a review of Gertzman's book about
the Jewish dominated smut-trade like this:

"Gertzman himself acknowledges towards the end of his book that his
uncle
once ran the most notorious 'dirty bookshop' in Philadelphia. For that
matter, Sam Roth's grandson is none other than Prof. James Kugel, the
eminent
Bible scholar at Harvard University. If there's a more complicated and
surprising tribe on earth, I've yet to hear about it." [NESVISKY, M.,
3-9-00]

There are manyother Jewish public figures, in various fields, that might
merit addition to a Luke Ford-like list of Jewish assault upon dominant
culture morality. In literature, homosexual Allen Ginsberg's 1950s-era
obscenity trial in San Francisco about his poem "Howl" (another landmark in
popular culture) escalated him thereafter to fame. As Ginsberg's Jewish
ideological nemesis, "neo-Conservative" Norman Podhoretz, notes:

"As the 60's wore on, I came more and more to see all this [hippie era]
as a
new kind of plague ... I ended with a lament for the victims it had
claimed
among the 'especially vulnerable' young ... [There were] shades of
antinomian propaganda
Ginsberg had done as much as anyone else in America to spread ...
Ginsberg
was also fulsomely praised as a pioneer of the gay-rights movement,
which indeed
he was. Yet so far as I have been able to determine, no one thought to
draw
a connection between the emergence of AIDS and the rampant homosexual
promiscuity promoted by Ginsberg (with buggery as an especially
'joyful'
feature that is described in loving detail in poem after pornographic
-- yes,
pornographic -- poem. And I could find only one mention (in the
Weekly
Standard) of Ginsberg's active sponsorship of the abominable North
American Man Boy Alliance (NAMBLA), an organization devoted to the
legalization of homosexual pedophilia. ('I don't know exactly how to
define
what's underage,' he once explained, quickly adding that he himself had
'never
made it with anyone under fifteen.')" [PODHORETZ, N., 2000]

The 1966 (Jewish comedian) Lenny Bruce trial was also one of the
trials of the 20th century. [GOODWIN, E., 1995, p. 301] He and Cafe Au Go
Go owner Howard Solomon were eventually found guilty of obscenity.
Bruce's "chief attorney, Efraim London, [was] a veteran of more than 250
censorship and obscenity cases ... The verdict seemed to unhinge Bruce. He
became obsessed with appellate litigation. Those legal wheels were still
grinding when, on August 3, 1966, he was found dead in his Hollywood home, a
hypodermic syringe nearby. An autopsy revealed the presence of morphine.
Death was recorded as accidental." [KNAPPMAN, E., 1995, p. 301-304]

In the early years of the twentieth century, warring against Victorian
era morality, Jewish "anarchist Emma Goldman also fostered a new
permissiveness; she toured the country, lecturing on subjects as 'The
Limitation of Offspring' and "Is Man a Varietiest or a Monogamist?'
She challenged feminists who advanced chastity, insisting that liberated
women faced more danger from too little sexual experience than they did from
too much." [LEIDER, E.M., p. 49] In the early 1890s, Goldman "became the
lover of [Alexander] Berkman and after a while, of his artist friend, Fedya,
as well. The three lived communally... Even certain radicals found Emma's
honesty on matters of sex hard to tolerate." [SHULMAN, A., 1970, p. 10, 11]
Goldman even once attempted to work as a prostitute to raise the money to
buy a gun for an assassination. [SHULMAN, A., 1970, p. 10]

Speaking of prostitutes, perhaps the most influential as the most
"famous prostitute in the world" is Xaviera Hollander, whose 1971 book
The Happy Hooker was a best-seller. (Hollander's "first fiance's name
was Frank Apfelbaum ... he transformed himself into Frank Allen.")
[HOLLANDER, X., 2000, p. 39] A daughter of a Holocaust survivor/Dutch
psychiatrist, it was her father "who instilled in her a love of Yiddishkeit
and a passion for Jewish culture." "She began running a high-end brothel out
of a brownstone on the Upper East Side," notes the Jewish ethnic magazine,
Moment,

"where her clients included a man who asked a lot of questions, soon
arousing
Hollander's suspicion. The man turned out to be Eric Kohn, a Jewish
journalist
researching a book. The two decided to collaborate on an
autobiographical
account of Hollander's life, and one year later The Happy Hooker
exploded onto the
the scene -- eventually selling 16 million copies ... Addicted to diet
pills and unable
to control her kleptomania ('I got orgasms from stealing,' she says),
she was
arrested for stealing a $40 nightgown. That theft, coupled with the
fact that she was
a confessed crinial in the States, led her to eventual deportation and
divorce ...
Businessman Arnold Blitz, a friend of Hollander's, has this to say: 'Xaviera
is not an ambassador for Jewish culture -- but for Jewishness." [LIPKIN,
L.,
FEB 2001]

In 1924, two eighteen-year-old men from very affluent families in
Chicago, Nathan Leopold and "his friend and lover Richard Loeb," made
international news for what was then popularized by its sensationalism as
the "crime of the century." Psychiatrist David Abrahamsen notes that the men

"kidnapped fourteen-year old Bobby Franks, and Loeb beat him to death.
They
stripped the body from the waist down, and although the evidence is
inconclusive,
one or both of them probably performed a sexual act on it ... In the
perspective
of all that has happend since the 1920s, the murder of Bobby Franks
hardly
qualifies as the crime of the century, as it was seen then. But at
that time the brutality and senselessness of the act exploded like a
bomb in the public consciousness. People
began to realize that society was changing in some frightening way.
The youth
of the two murderers (this was the beginning of the tidal wave that
came to be
called juvenile delinquency), the sexual undercurrent of their crime
and the fact
that theirs was the first major trial to use the testimony of
psychiatrists on
the background and state of mind of a defendant made an indelible
impression on the millions who followed the sensational case in the
newspapers."
[ABRAHAMSEN, D., 1983, p. 41-42]
In 1997, the Jewish Bulletin of
Northern California even featured an article about the early
20th-century German Jewish medical doctor, Magnus Hirschfeld, an

"openly gay sexologist, who founded a famed Berlin institute that
studied sexual
behavior and sold sex aids in its gift shop, [and] embodied the Nazi's
most-despised attributes ... [The] founding of Hirschfeld's
Scientific-Humanitarian Committee [is]
believed to be the first organization devoted to the legal rights of
homosexuals and
other sexual minorities ... 'In a sense, he was the founder of gay
liberation as a kind of
political, legal movement,' [says Jewish scholar David] Biale, 'He's a
very
important figure in gay history' ...In 1919 ... Hirschfeld established
his Institute
and Museum of Sexology. A former mansion was divided into consulting
offices,
study rooms, laboratories and a large museum devoted to every aspect of
human
sexuality, especially the 'Derangements of the Sexual Instinct' ...
[Some visitors]
left accounts of the strange exhibits and vast array of erotic
artifacts and aphrodisiacs
found in one of Berlin's most curious atttractions. The institute was
one of the first
cultural organizations liquidated by the Nazis, who destroyed the
building and its contents." [KATZ, L., 6-6-97]

Rabbi Daniel Lapin
notes fashion designer Rudi Gernreich's influence in America in the 1960s:
"When Rudi Gernreich,
a Jewish socialist from Vienna, settled in Los Angeles and foisted
the topless bathing suit on a shocked America, it seemed titillating
and daring. Many will recall the newspaper
photographs of
grim-faced policemen clutching towels around the shapely torsos of
giddy young women while escorting them off public beaches ... A
few hailed the flagrantly homosexual Gernreich as the hero of the
avant-garde." [LAPIN, D., 1999, p. 2]

Such Jewish influence is common in popular culture. In 1995 Jewish
fashion media mogul Calvin Klein came under fire by critics who compared his
clothing "ads to child pornography." [GIROUX, p. 16-17] The Israeli Nakash
brother, who own the Jordache jeans company, pushed daring new levels of
"lewd" imagery in their own ad campaign. [BYRON, p. 34-35] The Jewish
Bulletin had a feature on famous Jewish homosexual fashion mogul Isaac
Mizrahi in 1998:

"Viewers saw little-known sides of Mizrahi in 'Unzipped,' the 1995
documentary
about him. Filmmaker Douglas Keeve was, at the time, in a relationship
with the
designer. In one scene, Mizrahi put a sheer scrim behind the catwalk
and had
models change their outfits in full view of the audience. That kind of
chutzpah
gave viewers insight into his bold personality ... 'To this day the
designer
remains active in Jewish charities. 'I do what I can,' he says. 'I'm a
zealot, a
real lover of the Jewish faith." [SCHLEIER, C., 1-2-98]

Then there is Jewish fashion photographer Helmut Newton. "It is
impossible to deny the impact he has made," noted England's The
Independent in 2001,

"on fashion photography in particular ... To radical feminists, Newton
is the
antichrist. This is the man who photographed a woman on all fours with
a saddle
on her back, and another sitting on her underwear or an unmade bed,
with a gun
in her mouth ... Newton's vision is fuelled by sex, status, power and,
above all,
voyeurism ... Small wonder, then, that much of the photographer's most
successful
imagery has become far more famous than the garments he has chosen
to photograph ... Newton's influence is everywhere ... In the Sixties
and Seventies,
Newton's decadent vision may have been labelled 'porno chic,' but
today the rest
of the world has finally caught up with him and it's just plain chic.
There is
barely a stylist, photographer or designer working in fashion today
who can
fail to acknowledge Newton as an influence ... Helmut Newton was born
to
middle-class Jewish parents in Weimar Berlin in 1920, and the
decadent spirit of that place at that time is imprinted on his work
... Accusations of misogyny are still constantly made against Newton's
work." [FRANKEL, S., 5-9-01]

In 2001 Rabbi Ira Korff complained that "the suggestiveness in the
media these days is increasingly irresponsible -- it's really pornography --
and its been bothering me more and more." Korff should know what he's
talking about. He is the former president of National Amusements Inc., which
owns Viacom, the second-largest media conglommerate on earth (controlled by
Jewish mogul Sumner Redstone). "Korff," notes the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz, "says the worst purveyor of violence and profanity on TV is
Music Television (MTV,) which is owned by Viacom. But he adds, 'I have no
interest in attacking Viacom, and MTV is an ethically run business.' After
all, much of his own wealth was made while serving as president and later
consultant to National Amusements Inc." [HAUSMAN, T., 6-22-01]

Arnold Shaw notes some
1960s-era New York Jewish influence in the rock music world:

"The Fugs, a New York city group led by Tuli Kuperberg and Ed Sanders,
are
generally regarded as the first underground group. Political and
pornographic ...
they worked at shocking and repelling ... They received virtually no
airplay, since
disk jockeys woried that the pronunciation of their name would be
offensive.
Although appearances frequently prompted people to walk out on them,
they did secure a recording contract ... [including Golden Filth]
... With a
name taken from a pornographic paperback, the Velvet Underground helped
make underground Rock largely a New York phenomenon. Led by Lou Reed
[also Jewish] (b. early 1940), the group became part of Andy Warhol's
Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a multimedia show, in 1966. The subject
of Reed's
songs eliminated airplay for the records they made: heroin, in 'I'm
Waiting
for the Man'; cocaine, in 'Run, Run, Run'; sado-masochism, in 'Venus in
Furs';
and transvestitism, lesbianism, and homosexuality in other songs."
[SHAW, A.,
1982, p. 396]

From France, singer Sergio Gainsbourg [born Lucien Ginzburg]

"is still most famous in Britain for his number one 'Je t'aime moi
non plus': the
scandalous anthem which was in the British charts 30 years ago. He and
[actress Jane] Birkin simulated their lovemaking so effectively that
the
single was banned by the BBC and formally condemned by the Vatican
...Yet Gainsbourg is the greatest popular musician France has ever
produced ...
Echoes ofhis favourite technique, of murmuring profanities against
a delicate and beautiful harmony, can be heard in many contemporary
records, not least the later work of Leonard Cohen ... Towards the end
of his
life, the singer's media apparances beame ritual provocations: in one
television broadcast, he subjected a veteran paratrooper -- horrified
by Gainsbourg's dub version of the Marseillaise -- to a torrent of
obscenities, pausing only occasionally, to inflate condoms. On another
notorious
live show, sharing a platform witha young Whitney Houston, Gainsbourg,
then 58, turned to the presenter Michel Drucker and declared, in
English,
'I want to fuck her.'" [CHALMERS, R., 1-4-00]

"The rest of the
country," once joked Jewish comedian Woody Allen, "thinks of us [New
Yorkers] as homosexual Jewish communist pornographers. I think of us that
way, and I live here." [BROWN, A., 11-2-97] When Jewish White House intern
Monica Lewinsky became sexually involved with President Bill Clinton, she
shared the following joke to him: "Why do Jewish men like to watch pornos
backwards? So that they can watch the prostitute give back the money."
[FORWARD, 10-23-98, p. 1] "I'm such a sex machine," begins controverial
radio talk show host Howard Stern's autobiography, " I could take a piece of
wood and turn it into something erotic, something sensual, something
perverse." [STERN, H., 1995, p. 3]

Despite Jewish pre-eminence in the porno world, it's not kosher to
face this issue squarely. So how did feminist Susan Griffin examine -- like
so many - the issue of Jews and pornography, in her 1981 book Pornography
and Silence? She didn't mention them at all, except as a forum
for railing at length about Jews as victims of "anti-Semitic" stereotypes,
and forcing a link between sexual pornography and anti-Jewish hostility
(both from the same reservoirs of sick minds). "And yet it is precisely
because of the madness of the anti-Semitic or pornographic idea," she
declares,

"and precisely because it is a delusion, that it must assault reality
and try to
change it. A man 'believes' in anti-Semitic propaganda, or the
pornographic
ideology, because the illness of his mind REQUIRES that he believe
these ideas
to be true. Yet illness is of its very nature resistant. Thus, when a
madman is
told that he does not see the world correctly, and when he is given
evidence
against his prejudices, he will refuse to see the truth, and he will
even distort this evidence to support his own delusion. But most
significantly, he will even change reality so it supports his mad idea
of the world. This is what anti-Semitism and pornography requires of
their believers. THE DELUDED MIND MUST TRY TO REMAKE THE WORLD AFTER AN
ILLUSION." [author's emphasis] [GRIFFIN, S., 1981, p. 121]

Griffin has more to say about this subject, using the innocense of Jews
as an attack upon the pornographic (anti-Semitic) mind:

"The same mind [of Adolf Hitler]
that dreamed of itself as the bearer of culture conceived that its
nemesis, the destroyer of culture, was the Jew. As a shadow
to the fantasy of Aryan dominance, the anti-Semite invented an enemy
of awesome proportions. In the fabricated document known as 'The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' the anti-Semite imagined a
congregation of Jews who meet in a cemetery to
plan the death of Aryan culture. Of course, a pornographic image lies
at the center
of this imagined plan. Thus the imagined Jews in the imagined cemetery
contrive a lurid plot to 'demand marriage between Jews and
Christians.' Together they enjoy the idea of defiling Gentile women.
And as the meeting adjourns, a huge and shapeless golden calf emerges
from the tomb to symbolize the materiality of the Jew, just as
the fear of matter and mortality have emerged from the mind the
anti-Semite in this fantasy of evil power." [GRIFFIN, S., 1981, p.
175]

Even Judy Blume, a well-known Jewish writer of children's books, is
"routinely" listed among America's "most censored U.S. authors" for testing
moral boundaries. Outraged parents continually raise complaint. In 1997
alone, there were nine efforts to take her books for children off library
shelves, particularly for undercurrent sexual themes. Blume's juvenile book
Deenie, for example, addresses masturbation, and Forever
includes a penis named Ralph. [WOULFE, M., 7-20-98; JENKINS, E., 4-13-99, p.
134] Famous Jewish novelist Judith Krantz notes that "My most famous piece
[while a writer for Cosmopolitan], about which I'm still asked, was called
'The Myth of Multiple the Orgasm,' inspired by a book by a general
practitioner Dr. Rubin, who insisted that any woman who settled for less
than fifty orgasms during a single sexual session was being cheated." [KRANTZ,
J., 2000, p. 236]
How about Willie Hammerstein's influence
upon popular culture? As Marybeth Hamilton notes, by 1913, his Victoria
Theatre
"became New York's
top-grossing vaudeville playhouse, renowned (or notorious) for
its garish attractions -- in Hammerstein's phrase, for its 'freak acts'
... [Siamese twins, etc.] ... But more compelling
than these physical
and geographical oddities were the freaks of
publicity, the
city's most notorious inhabitants, men and more frequently women who
had made names for themselves through
their links to New
York's criminal and sexual underworld, in headline- grabbing vice raids,
'Love Nest,' scandals, and murders ... The emphasis
was on sexual
scandals, especially those featuring young, attractive
women." [HAMILTON,
M., 1995, p. 3]
Exploiting their
notoriety, Hammerstein hired such people from real-life, sensational news
items to appear at his forum as performers.

What about Anton LeVay's influence upon modern morals, particularly in
attracting alienated youth? LeVay, born Howard Stanton Levey, and known as
the "Black Pope," founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco in 1966 and
was bathed with media attention. Creating a web of lies about himself, "'he
has constructed,' noted one reporter, 'a personal history untruthful in
every fact that can be verified.'" [GRACE, K., 7-28-97] "'His Satanist's
Bible' (1967) proposed a sub-Nietschean philosophy wherein might equals
right, and immediate self-gratification constitutes the chief duty of man.
'Be simply animal man,' the Satanist's Bible instructs, 'hate your enemies,
and if someone smites you, smash him ... Susie Atkins, one of [Charles]
Manson's knife-wielding groupies, blames La Vey for her descent into
depravity and murder." [DAILY TELEGRAPH, 11-11-97, p. 25] More than a
million copies of Levey's books have been printed. [LOS ANGELES TIMES,
11-8-97, p. 8]

LeVay, who died in 1997, notes the Church of Satan's web site, was "a
self-loathing man of Jewish descent who embraced fascism toward the end of
his life." [CHURCH OF SATAN/1] His own daughter, Zeena, notes that he
"routinely beat and abused those of his female disciples with whom he had
sex, forcing them into prostitution as part of his 'Satanic counseling' and
collected their earnings. In 1986 [Levey] was a passsive witness to the
sexual molestation of his own grandson by a long time friend." [CHURCH OF
SATAN/2]

The traditional Jewish animosity towards Christianity is reflected by
Levey in almost cartoon form. Levey's Church of Satan teachings are of
course antithetical to those of Christianity. "Behold the crucifix," wrote
Levey, "what does it symbolize? Pallid incompetence hanging on a tree ... [Levey's
book] advocates ritual masturbation, rites 'to summon one for lustful
purposes or establish a sexually gratifying situation,' as well as rites 'to
cause the destruction of an enemy'" [HARPUR, T., 3-5-97, p. A7] "For more
than a decade," notes the St. Louis Post Dispatch, in evaluating
Levey's influence,

"scholars have noted a growing interest in Christianity's archenemy of
goodness.
The Reverend Richard Woods, a Dominican who relates theoogy to popular
culture, traces the upward curve [of interest in Satanism] from 1966,
the year
that Anton LaVey's Church of Satan made its debut in San Francisco.
The
same year brought the release of Rosemary's Baby, Ira Levine's movie
about
about a woman who gave birth to the devils' child. In the early 1970s,
the book
and movie 'The Exorcist' titillated millions." [The film The Exorcist
was
directed by William Friedkin, also Jewish]. "[SCHJAEFFER, P., 2-5-89]

Seminal too, of
course, to Luke Ford's overview of those that have shaped modern sexual
mores in western society is Sigmund Freud, from which so many sexual
populists stem. Feminist Kate Millet, in Sexual
Politics, noted Freudianism's "penis envy" and its other oppressive
theories as profoundly detrimental to women:
"Although generally
accepted as a prototype of the liberal urge
toward sexual
freedom, and a signal contributor toward softening
traditional
puritanical inhibitions upon sexuality, the effect of Freud's
work, that of his
followers, and still more that of his populizers, was to rationalize the
invidious relationship between the sexes ... And as
regards the sexual
revolution's goal of liberating female humanity from
its traditional
subordination, the Freudian position came to be pressed
into the service of
a strong counterrevolutionary attitude." [MILLET, p. 178]

As Earl Grollman has observed:

"Although [Sigmund] Freud
was considered a non-believer [of Judaism] and even
stated his disavowals of the rituals and rites, he did feel that he
retained the best
attributes of the faith. Numerous biographers noted that his home life
was warm and loving, that learning occupied and extremely high
priority and that he had a strong
feeling of identification with other Jews. Even his doctrine
concerning the powerful
drive of sexual urges grew out of Freud's interpretation of the basic
ingredients of Jewishness." [Grollman, E., 1965, p. xxv]

In 2001, the Jewish Bulletin noted the case of Rabbi Leslie
Alexander who

"has made it her mission to turn Jews on ... 'Judaism is about giving
pleasure
to one another and having no qualms or inhibitions about it ... When a
Jew goes
before God, they are going to have to answer for every pleasure they
didn't take
We, as American Jews, are saddled with a Christian sexual perspective
which
doesn't at all reflect Jewish ideas. We have all this moral baggage
about who we are sexually; none of that is Jewish ... We spend so muuc
time as a society trying tofree ourselves from sexual mores. If we had just
learned from our own tradition, we
wouldn't have to try ...The Jewish texts are very blunt and direct
[about sex] ... Teaching it is lots of fun. My students usually say,
'Whoa! They really said that?" [GOLDSMITH, A., 11-23-01]

"Alexander," notes the Bulletin,

"remembered once reading a text in
which a rabbi is telling a group of other
rabbis about the various things he would consider sexual perversions.
'And
then, at the end of his speech the rest of the rabbis told him he was
wrong' ....
In addition to loving the 'racy' nature of the subject, Alexander
enjoyed teaching
about Jewish sexuality because it's a way to pique people's interest
in Judaism."
[GOLDSMITH, A., 11-23-01 Profoundly
influential, of course, in shaping popular morality is the behind-the-scenes
world of mainstream Hollywood: "Show people had always
been careless about morals, and in a town, in an industry, dedicated to
peddling glamour and romance, it would be surprising if the passions enacted
before the cameras did not sometimes carry over into real life ...
Youngsters pouring into Los Angeles, desperate for a movie career, were
prepared to risk the perils of the casting couch." [SHIPMAN, D. 1993, p.
136] As noted earlier, the "casting couch" has long been an institution in
Hollywood. In crudest form, the results of such sexual expansion inevitably
include the likes of famed Jewish Hollywood "madam" Heidi Fleiss and her
much-publicized Hollywood drug and prostitution ring in the early 1990s. The
ring reportedly included Columbia executives Michael Nathanson
and Barry Josephson as important players. [See earlier
discussion] William Stadiem notes the Hollywood Jewish prostitute
contingent within the genral stable of non-Jewish madam "Alex Adams":

"Robin was part of an entire group of young privileged hookers Alex had
dubbed
'the JAP [Jewish American Princess] Pack.' They loved nightclubs,
Porsches,
Versace, and coke, mostly went to UCLA on and off, hated the idea of
working
at a real job, and could only soak their parents for so much."] ADAMS,
A., 1993,
p. 55]
Hollywood's "Sin
City" entertainment playground, Las Vegas, especially renowned for gambling,
prostitution and other vices, must also be added to the list of great
questionable Jewish influences upon popular culture. (In Hollywood, Al and
Lew Wertheimer founded an illegal gambling den in Hollywood called the
Clover Club. The Jewish Hollywood crowd later set up such a resort near
Tijuana, Mexico, called Agua Caliente.) [GABLER, N., 1988, p. 261] Las
Vegas, as an institution, has been profoundly influential in its efforts to
sanitize, normalize, and popularize some of the most troubling expressions
of human nature as acceptable recreation in western society. As
professor Alan Balboni observes, "The Jews and Italians who made up 'the
Boys' [the Mafia] were able to develop the burgeoning gaming industry to the
point where it eventually became a significant influence on the American
scene." [BALBONI, p. ix] Jewish entrepreneurship was not alone in this, but
it was central. [See
earlier information about the huge Jewish influence in the formation of Las
Vegas] For purposes here, we may wonder about the observations of Jewish
commentator James Yaffe: "If Jews can be said to have a characteristic vice,
that vice is gambling. Even back in the shtetl they were
gamblers. Many psychiatrists have mentioned this phenomena to me, yet nobody
has been able to explain it exactly." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 268] We may also
note the case of Mike Rose, the Jewish CEO of Holiday Corporation
(Holiday Inn, et al), who "steered [the company] into gambling
when it bought into Harrah's in 1980, causing Holiday's
president and two directors to resign. Rose later sold the namesake motel
chain to create a gambling concern called the Promus Corporation."
The company's president, L. M. Clyde, retired "because he could not
reconcile his Presbyterian religious beliefs with gambling ... Clyman did
not go quietly, and two Holiday directors joined him in
resigning on moral grounds." [JOHNSTON, D., 1992, p. 49, photo section]
Across the earth, in
1998 conservative Israeli commentator Jonathan Rosenblum lamented the
dubious moral status and reputation of the modern Jewish state:
"Once again
anti-Semites portrayed us as a sexual libertines and perverts to undermine
our moral authority. Today we cheerfully admit the charges and
imagine ourselves beloved by the world for it. Are we and
our culture similarly honored when a CNN documentary claims
that we have the highest rate of prostitution in the world?" [ROSENBLUM,
J., 5-15-98, p. 9]
Rosenbaum probably
could not have imagined the grotesque defamation of the holiest of Jewish
holies by young Israelis the next year. In 1999, a group of 40 Israeli
teenagers visiting Auschwitz and other sites of Jewish mass extermination in
Poland under the Nazis, garnered international outrage from Jewish
communities when it was discovered that they had "ended a tour of Poland's
death camps with a strip show ... only hours after visiting Treblinka, where
900,000 Jews were murdered ... On a previous occasion, Israelis were shocked
after a group of [Israeli] army officers went to a casino after visiting
Auschwitz." [GROSS, T., 11-28-99]

In 2001, a Jewish community in England made the news when a "stag night
with three strippers performing 'sexually explicit acts'" was held at a
synagogue (Finchley Synagogue's Kinloss Suite) ... Some of the funds raised
was supposed to be for a Jewish charity. [ZERDIN, J., 2-9-01] Jewish American
feminist Andrea Dworkin notes her disillusionment with her liberation myths
about Israel when she first visited the Jewish state:
"In 1988 I went to
Israel ... I was distressed by what I found, including Holocaust-themed
pornography and battered and raped women. Why would I expect it to
be different? ... In Israel there is a genre of pornography defined
by the theme of the Holocaust: women's
bodies in pieces run
down by trains or skeletal standing by open
ovens." [DWORKIN,
A., 2000, p. xi, 168]

Jewish American Paul Cowan noted this anecdote about looking for his
Jewish identity in Israel in 1982:

"I had an enemy in Beersheba, a man named Itzhak, the city's leading
stud.
He'd been a gigolo on the French Riviera, had run drugs from Israel to
Syria,
and now owned his own bar, a place called the Barsheba, where you could
often
find the sort of brawls that seemed so exciting in American Westerns.
He was
always stealing women. I had a particular grudge against him because he
had
seduced Pam, an Englishwoman I was dating, made her a hostess at his
bar,
and had then become her part-time pimp." [COWAN, P., 1982, p. 108]
[See also "White Slavery" chapter]

In 2001, Israel's state-run
television station elicited outrage from women's groups when it broadcast "a
video clip of an attacker beating a naked woman whom he had allegedly raped
... The president of the Na'amat women's organization ... said in a a letter
.. that she hoped [the station would not] compete for ratings through the
use of violence and pornography." [HAAS, D., 2-16-01, p. 2] In 2000, the
Egyptian newspaper Al-Arabi claimed that "film producers [in Israel]
are tracking down actors who look like current Egyptian stars, and using
them to shoot porn flicks in Israel. The films are then imported to Egypt
and sctreened for paying customers ... [Film actress] Yusra Alawi told
reporters she is asking her attorney to obtain copies of the films and to
pursue legal action against those reponsible." [BOULWARE, J., 6-7-00]The Jewish state was
also severely embarrassed by a July 2000 incident in South America that
engendered "huge play in the Brazilian media." Israeli diplomat Arie Scher
was implicated in the production of child pornography when Brazilian police
discovered videos and photographs in Hebrew teacher George Steinberg's home.
[NIGRI, S., 7-5-2000] Scher fled to Israel before he could be arrested by
Brazilian police. (In 2000, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that
South Africa was "one of the world's worst centres for child abuse and child
sex slavery ... International crime syndicates based in Nigeria, China,
Israel, and Russia have become involved in the South African trade.") [O'LOUGHLIN,
9-9-2000]
(On the continued
theme of child pornography, in 1996, David Webber, former director of the
Calgary Jewish Community Council and Youth Director of Beth Israel
Synagogue, was sentenced to six years in prison "for possessing child
pornography and molesting seven boys over the past eight years." Police
found in his possession 3,635 photos of young boys, 16 pornography videos,
224 books and articles about "man-boy love," and other indicting materials.
The provincial prosecutor called Webber an "unrepentant pedophile." [SLADE,
D., 10-26-96, p. B5] In 1997, across Canada in Nova Scotia, Stuart Friedman,
the cantor at Halifax's Orthodox Beth Israel synagogue was "convicted and
sent back to the United States [to his native Baltimore] for possessing and
distributing child pornography ... one of the biggest [news] stories to hit
Halifax in a long time." [CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS, 2-6-97,
p. 10] Police found a range of pornographic materials, including sets of
handcuffs. In yet another child pornography case in Canada, in 1994 Corey
Jones, a professional sex offender rehabilitation counselor," wrote that "My
head hangs in despair ... when I read of the Canadian Civil Liberties
Association coming to the defense of Eli Langer, an artist charged under the
new law against child pornography because of an exhibition of paintings
which depict children in various sex acts with other children and adults."
Langer, arrested at the Mercer Union Gallery, is also Jewish; "his father is
an amateur Holocaust historian.") [JONES, C., 1-20, 1994, p. A21; TORONTO
LIFE, 7/1994]
In the world of
American pornography, particularly the film-making side, Luke Ford observes
that
"Though only 2
percent of the American population, Jews dominate porn. Most of the
leading male performers through the 1980s
had Jewish parents.
Leading Jewish pornographers include Wesley Emerson, Paul
Fishbein, Lenny Friedlander, Paul Norman, Bobby Hollander, Rubin
Gottesman, Hank Weinstein, Fred Hirsch and his children Steve
and Marjorie, Steve Orenstein, Theodore
Rothstein, and Reuben
Sturman." [FORD, p. 21]

At his Internet web site, Ford elaborates in a section entitled Jews.
"Secular Jews," he writes,

"attributes the large number of Jews in porn to the desire for profits.
Jews
gravitate towards money ... If four people compete for a job, and three
of them
are goyim [non-Jews], the Jew, all things being equal, will get the
job.
That's the way I work. If I've got three actors going for a part, and
one
of them is Jewish, and they're all in the same ball park ... sue me." [lukeford.com]

(Note: As the parameters of what constitutes
"morality' shifts wider decade by decade, any definition of pornography
constitutes a controversial subject. On today's terms, pornography, to this
author's sensibilities, is not the public depiction of sexuality itself, but
rather the exploitation, debasement, robbing of dignity, devaluation and
even ruthless dehumanization of the most intimate of human connections:
frail emotions, human weakness, vulnerability, and the act of love and
intimate human tenderness despoiled for public entrepreneurial profit).Among the most
important Jewish porn performers of all, is Harry Reems (real name: Harry
Streicher). Reems, notes omnipresent lawyer Alan Dershowitz, was "a nice
Jewish boy making his living by doing what lots of people would pay
to do ... [He was] the undisputed king of the porno actors." [DERSHOWITZ,
1987, p. 156, 155] Dershowitz knows Reems' story well because he
successfully defended the actor against obscenity-related charges in
Memphis. "If Herb Streicher had not become an actor," notes the lawyer, "he
would have been a first-rate press agent. Every time a story [supportive of
his case] appeared, he placed it in his press kit and sent copies to other
journalists. This had a snowball effect ... It was impossible to pick up a
newspaper or magazine or turn on a TV or radio talk show without coming
across some reference to the Reems case. Reems had become an overnight
celebrity." [DERSHOWITZ, 1987, p. 171] Dershowitz even attracted the ire of
feminist and other outraged groups when he went to court to argue for a
student showing at Harvard University of Reem's best known movie, Deep
Throat, (an early 1970s porno movie which grossed $60 million
worldwide). [DERSHOWITZ, 1987, 184]
By the late 1980s,
freedom fighter Dershowitz had a growing track record in such matters. Well
before Harry Reems, he notes with pride that he "successfully defended the
film I am Curious (Yellow) ... [which was] made in Sweden. [It] had
been [the] first commercially distributed motion picture to show explicit
sex." [DERSHOWITZ, 1987, p. 163] He next was the lawyer
for Terry Levene's movie, Belinda. Levene was convicted of
obscenity-related charges by a jury trial; Dershowitz won an appeal for him.
[DERSHOWITZ, 1987, p. 176]
In 1995, Nadine
Strosse, a professor of law at New York University, even wrote a book
entitled Defending Pornography. She defends herself as a
champion of free speech with the usual "Jew as oppressed victim"
credentialing:
"My father was a
Holocaust survivor. I am a Jew. I know from logic
and from observation
and from experience that the more powerless
you are as a group,
gender or ideology, the more you should defend
your freedom of
speech." [GERRARD, N., 1-28-96, p. 15]

Indeed, the very pardigm of the marginalized and popularly despised
pornographer rests comfortably upon the Jewish "outsider/victim" model. Both
Jew and pornographer commonly ascribe to themselves attributes of moral
nobility against a perceived repressive society: in both cases the enemy is
Christian culture/values where sexual expression has been traditionally
devalued. In the porno context the enemy is configured as prudishness. The
struggle of the Jew and pornographer is, in this world view, a struggle
against oppression; both Jew and pornographer are declared to be innocent of
moral wrongdoing. Their common goal is conceived merely as the struggle for
freedom. This, and recent efforts in the (traditionally despised)
pornographic world to reinvent itself as heroic is noted by Carina Chocano:

"If sex in our culture were not so 'steeped in shame and guilt' they
argue, and if
the sex and pornography industry were not marginalized, then pornography
would
cease to reflect harmful attitudes, rear its had out of the gutter, and
provide, as
one of the panelists [at the First Annual World Pornography Conference]
put
it, 'masturbatory catharsis for the masses.' 'That stuff is bullshit,'
retorted
Glasgow Phillips, an author and critic [of pornography], 'To make money
in
this business you have to exploit,' he says,' and it's so easy to do. I
mean,
you are aware of how many dumb sluts there are in this town [Los
Angeles]?
You just cast them." [CHOCANO, C., 1998]

"Nadine Strossen's objective in Defneind Photography is to destroy the
reputation and achievements of the feminist movement against
pornography.
To this end, she dishes up the same tired old caricature of us as
anti-sex
prudes, pro-censorship, and in collustion with the right wing ...
Strossen's
book was enthusiastically feted by the media not because it's so
brilliant but
because she's president of the American Civil Liberties Union (an
organization
that has increasingly become a watchdog for the interests of
pornogarphers).
The fact that Strossen professes to be a feminist gives her a lot more
clout
than man would have doing the same dirty work for a dirty industry." [RUSSSELL,
D., SUMMER 1995]

There are apparently no limits to the reshaping of sexual morals. In
2001, Princeton professor Peter Singer ("son of Viennese Jews who escaped to
Australia in 1938, shortly after Hitler's invasion") [NASAR, S., 4-10-00, p.
A1] made national news, and national ridicule, for a book review he authored
at an online magazine, Nerve. The title of the piece was Heavy
Petting, where he endorsed bestiality, including lines like this: "Who
has not been at a social occasion disrupted by the household dog gripping
the legs of a visitor and vigorously rubbing his penis against them ... In
private, not everyone objects to being used by his dog in this way, and
occasionally mutally satisfying activities may develop." [BILLUP, A.,
4-2-01] The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette featured a poignant editorial
about Singer, an expert on "bioethics,"and the broad implications of such
thoughts from the Ivy League college:

"[Peter Singer is] a Princeton professor
of bioethics who wants to know when the
sexual revolution is gonna start revolting again. He's ready to get it
on with
the animal kingdom ... He was brought to Princeton with much fanfare by
that
university's president, Harvey Shapiro, who also happens to head up the
President's
National Bioethics Advisory Committee. Yep, these guys are shaping
national
policy. Ethical policy." [ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE, 4-8-01, p. J4]
In 1999, Hope Weissman, another Jewish
professor, this one at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, was attracting
controversy for her class, "Pornography: Writing of Prostitutes." The class
featured readings from everything from the Marquis de Sade to Larry Flynt's
Hustler magazine, as well as a guest striptease performance by
well-known Jewish pornographer-"performance artist" Annie Sprinkle, who
gained notoriety for inviting art audiences to inspect her cervix. "Create
your own work of pornography," Weissman instructed her class. [PINKERTON,
J., 5-20-99, p. B9] In 2001, after public protest Peter Lehman's class
"Sexuality in Media" was cancelled. The year before he had "required the
students to sign a waiver before screening X-rated movies." [ASSOCIATED
PRRSS, PORN, 11-9-01]Annie Sprinkle, born
Ellen Steinberg, is "the Jewish porn star/performance artist," [EPSTEIN, R.,
10-15-99, p. 18] who is the veteran of so much sexual variety that she
"stopped counting her own personal sexual encounters at 3,500." [HELBER, A.,
8-19-99] "When I went to [visit the former Nazi concentration camp] Dachau,"
she once said, "I could see how tied in that was to sex." "How so?" wondered
her interviewer. "Well," she continued,
"I'm not clear enough
at the moment to really say, but the quest was for
power and the
visceral quality, the bodies, the blood ... I don't know. It's just too big to
even try to explain, but it was just a sense I had of how truly tied in
that was with a misdirected sexual energy ... [There is] my Jewish tit
print. I kind of like the idea of the heart and breast and the nurturing to the
feeling and the nipple and the sensuality being used to create a religious
symbol: a Jewish star. And it's not that I'm poking fun or anything. I'm
honoring both the breast and the Jewish star in my mind." [FRIEDLANDER,
M., 2000]

(In similar terms, Jewish scholar Michael Govrin describes the holiest
of Jewish places: "Jerusalem, God's bride, His place of desire, is always an
erotic place of masculine desire. Jerusalem is the biggest harlot of all
places, the world's cunt exposed on all the television screens, in an
ongoing peep show, day and night. And yet, in the classical paradox of
desire, everyone has his Jerusalem virginal and pure, defiled only by the
others' abusive and defamatory biographies of her.") [GOVRIN, M., 200]

In 1998, a conference on sexuality was held at the State University of
New York at New Paltz; it was sponsored by the college's women's studies
program. "What apparently must be called the highlight of the conference,"
noted the Clarion,

"was the performance of [Jewish
lesbian performer] Shelly Mars, a stripper from
a bisexual bathhouse. During her performance, 'Whiplash: Tales of a
Tomboy,'
which featured her simulating sex and screaming obscenities, Mars
collided with
the crotch of auddience member Peter Shipley, chairman of a private
educational
group called the National Catholic Forum. Shipley's pen went into her
nostril, and
Mars fell back shouting that she was bleeding. Then she removed her
pants and
blouse and exposed herself."[CLARION, FEB 1998]

Other prominent Jewish porno performers include Randy Becker ("steamy
nude pinup boy for the gay community") [GERSTEL, J., 5-22-97, p. B10] and
Ron Jeremy. As one Canadian newspaper noted in 1999, "With 1,500 films to
his credit over a 22-year career, Ron Jeremy is one of the most prolific and
famous porn stars in the history of the business." Jeremy describes himself
as a "good Jewish boy" who started out as a schoolteacher with a Master's
degree in special education. [GRIWKOWSKY, F., 12-8-99, p. 38] (On a more
modest scale, in 1994, a New York policewoman, Carol Shaya, "born in Israel
to a Jewish father and Catholic mother," made the news for posing nude in
Playboy.) [HALL, A., 7-11-94, p. 2, 21]

In 1998, Rabbi Shmuel Boteach, although underscoring that he distances
himself from pornography, even clocked in when an excerpt from his book,
Kosher Sex, in Playboy magazine. [DAILY TELEGRAPH, 10-26-98, p.
A9] In 2001, Boteach sued an Internet dating service, MatchNet.com, a
firm he was commissioned to represent. Joe Shapira and Alon Carmel, founders
of MatchNet.com, are Israelis, as is Ami Shafrir, another developmental
partner in the Internet firm. However, "the heart of Shafrir's business
empire was another company with headquarters in the Wilshire Boulevard
Building: Amtec Audiotext, an operator of telephone sex lines that he
says generated revenue of $60 million in its best year, 1995." Shafrir is
also the landlord for MatchNet, in Beverly Hills. Matchnet
divisions include Americansingles.com and Jdate, the latter of
which "one of every 10 Jewish singles in the United States uses it and ...
the site has been responsible for 300 marriages in its four years of
operation." Rabbi Boteach was eventually approached by another Israeli,
Daniel Nicherie, himself once convicted of bank fraud, who "who told the
rabbi that Mr. Carmel and Mr. Shapira were pornographers who had been sued
nearly 40 times." "The intrigue [surrounding MatchNet.com]," noted
the New York Times, "stretches from Beverly Hills to Israel to the
German stock market. The characters include a phone sex entrepreneur, the
former convict who took control of his business and a disbarred lawyer
obsessed with exposing the underbelly of the online dating industry." [ELLIN,
A., 2001] Then there is Gloria
Leonard, also Jewish, past pornography actress, former president of the
Adult Film and Video Association of America and president of the "Free
Speech Coalition." She notes that she "was at the cutting edge of a
phenomenon known as 'phone sex' during my tenure as publisher of High
Society magazine, which ultimately resulted in a landmark case fought in
the United State Supreme Court, which we won." [WASHINGTON TIMES, 10-12-99,
p. A2] Ms. Leonard, promoted as "a name synonymous with quality adult
entertainment of all kinds," was once a "convertible bond specialist from
Wall Street." [LAFEE, S., 4-29-89, p. D2] In 2001, when she stepped down as
president of the "Free Speech Coalition" (a largely porn activist group),
she was replaced by "her long time friend and fellow Free Speech board
member Mara Epstein. A veteran of the adult entertainment business, Epstein
previously ran icandy Entertainment, a DVD producer, and was employed
by Laserdisc Entertainment, the exclusive producer of XXX laserdiscs
in the early 1990s."
[ADULT VIDEO NEWS, JUNE 2001]
Elsewhere, Sandy Kane
has, notes Jay Weissberg, "the raunchiest, most Jewish show on cable ...
Sandy bills herself as the world's only stripper comic." [WEISSBERG, J.,
2000] Other noteworthy Jews in the porn field include Steve Greenberg,
co-chair of the Committee on Male Sex Work at the 1997 International
Prostitution Conference; Karlyn Lotney, producer of the "San Francisco-based
erotic cabaret 'In Bed with Fairy Butch'"; and Carol Leigh ("Scarlet
Harlot"), head of the Prostitution Education Network, and founding member of
the homosexual advocacy group, Act Up! "Being stigmatized for the way you're
earning money," says Ms. Leigh, "is a way to persecute Jews, right?" [COHEN,
B., 2000] Other prominent Jewish pornography performers/producers include
Nina Hartley, Jerry Butler, Hershel Savage (Harvey Savage), Sam Weinstein
(alias Armand Weston or Anthony Spinelli), and Paul Thomas. [JEWHOO, 2000]

Then there is Abby Ehmann who "pledges to meet the tastes of fetishist
and spectators who come to her regular Saturday night party, Click + Drag
at Club Mother" in New York City. She edits 'Extreme Fetish" magazine,
"dubbed the best alternative sex publication in New York by TimeOut
magazine. She is on the board of directors of Feminists for Free Expression,
an organization that fights restrictions on free speech, and she is a writer
and a performer." [KAKOULAS, M., 6-26-00]

In his list of Jewish
film pornographers, Luke Ford ascribes to Reuben Sturman the nomer
"godfather of porn," noting that "although not as well known as Playboy's
Hugh Hefner, Hustler's Larry Flynt, and Penthouse's Bob
Guccione, Sturman exerted far greater influence. One competitor complained
that Sturman did not control the adult entertainment industry; he was the
industry." [FORD, p. 22] Sturman himself told the Los Angeles Times
that "No one was anywhere near me [in the pornography business]." [JOHNSON,
J., 5-31-95, p. B1] "To expand his hold on the
[pornography] industry," noted the Times, "he produced films with one
company, sex paraphernalia with another and then sold everything through his
own stores." By 1977 an FBI report declared that Sturman had accomplished
"an almost total takeover" of the "peep-show industry." [JOHNSON, J. p. B1]
The San Diego Union-Tribune noted in 1991 that
"in its 1986 report,
the [U.S. government] Meese Commission on Pornography singled
out Sturman as the administration's top porn target. It identified
him as the number one worldwide distributor of pornography, with
financial control of nearly 200 businesses in 19 states, one
Canadian province, and six foreign countries." [LAVELLE, P., 1991,
p. B1]
(Ford cites figures of
800 Sturman adult bookstores in all American states and forty other
countries). [FORD, p. 129]
Sturman was
eventually worth an estimated $100 million. His main company, Sovereign
News, noted the Los Angeles Times, was "based in a sprawling
Cleveland warehouse which is cynically referred to by some lawmen as the Ft.
Knox of pornography." [HOUSTON, P., 1987,p. 20]
Sturman, son of
Jewish Russian immigrants, depicted himself as a free speech crusader and
evaded the law for most of his life. (Omnipresent Alan Dershowitz once
defended his deeds, declaring that "the worst thing [Sturman] did was to
turn feminists into censors." [JOHNSON, J., 1995, p. B1]) The "Godfather of
Porn" was finally sent to prison in 1992 for income tax evasion and
interstate transportation of films that depicted "humans eating excrement,
women having sex with horses, pigs, chickens and other animals, and acts of
sadomasochism." [LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL, 10-29-97, p. B1] Ralph Levine, a
former Sturman partner in a Las Vegas porno bookshop called Talk of the
Town, (described by one newspaper as "a gaudy smut emporium on the eastern
fringes of downtown Las Vegas") [LAVELLE, P., 1991, p. B1] became a key
government witness against him. Another Jewish co-defendant in the case,
Stanley Loeb, "pleaded guilty to interstate transportation of obscene
materials." [LAVELLE, P., p. B1] Sturman was convicted in 1992 but escaped
from a minimal security prison in the California desert that same year, was
captured, and later convicted of further charges, including extortion.
Another Jewish associate, Herbert Fineberg, was also convicted for the
attempted murder of another porn shop owner. [FORD, p. 121-132] Another
member of the porno chain, Allan Goelman, was convicted of income tax
evasion of $270,000 in personal profits as head of Sturman's "U.S. retail
operations." [HOUSTON, P., 1987, p. 20]
"I was a
businessman," said Sturman once imprisoned, blandly explaining his
activities, "I didn't see [pornography] as good. I didn't see it as bad. It
was a product to be sold." [JOHNSON, J., 1995, p. B1]
More recently, in
1999 the Los Angeles Times called 26-year old Seth Warshavsky the
"Bill Gates of Smut" and "the most infamous pornographer of the Internet
Age." [EHRMAN, M., 6-13-99, p. 26] He founded and heads Internet
Entertainment Group (partner: Mark Cohn; Director of Sales and
Marketing: Jonathan Silverman). Divisions include Club
Love, Manhole, Sex Fantasy, Girls Girls Girls, and many others. "Depending
on who's talking about him," noted the Seattle Weekly,
"[Warshavsky's]
either a genius, a misogynist, a respected global businessman, an
exploiter of children, the Bill Gates of Porn, or the Larry Flynt of
Cyberspace." [ANDERSON, R., 2-11-99, p. 22]
The Seattle-based
Warshavsky started out at age 17 with a phone sex business. By 1999 IEG had
grossed $75 million in its first three years. Warshavsky had to park his
Jaguar after his driving license was taken away -- over 20 moving violations
in five years. Warshavsky has been accused of choking a girlfriend in a
limousine, "stalking" her, and threatening her former boyfriend. [ANDERSON,
R., 2-11-99, p. 22]
In 1999 IEG garnered
Catholic outrage and a subsequent lawsuit from the Archdiocese of St. Louis.
"IEG recently linked its sites to others that carries news of Pope John Paul
II's visit a couple of weeks ago to St. Louis," noted the Seattle Weekly,
"To make sure Catholics were properly horrified, IEG included an account of
papal sex scandals and dirty religious jokes." [Anderson, R., 2-11-99, p.
22] The Archdiocese won a court injunction against IEG's use of the term
"papal visit" as a name for one of its websites, a strategy intended to lure
the religious to porno that also defamed and ridiculed the Catholic faith.
"This was an absurd ruling," declared Warshavsky about the court's decision,
"This is a prime example of how the Church has been able to use the legal
system to suppress free speech." [SALTER, J., 1-21-99]
(Similarly, in 2001, computer hackers commandeered the militant Muslim
Palestinian group Hamas's web site. Visitors to the Hamas home page were
subjected to hard-core pornography images that could not be quickly clicked
away. Outraged Hamas officials blamed Israelis for the violation.) [FREE
REPUBLIC/REUTERS, 3-26-01]
In August 2000, NBC's
online news site featured an article entitled "The Sultans of Smut." The
aforementioned Seth Warshawsky and Jonathan Silverstein (by now president of
Cybererotica, whose founder and chief is Ron Levi) made a list
of ten of "the influential players in the business [pornography] that built
the Internet." Another "player" was Bill Asher, "president of Vivid
Entertainment Group, the "world's leading producer of adult films and
videos." VEG was founded by Steven Hirsch and David James. VEG also owns
Hot Network, "considered the largest hard core adult television
network in the country." [BLANKSTEIN, A., 7-1-2000, p. C1] Other Jewish
surnames on the list of ten "Sultans" included (Danni) Ashe, who founded
"one of the best known adult sites on the web," (Eric) Langen, and (David)
Marshlack whose company gained fame by charging a fee for computer users to
ask O.J. Simpson a question on the Internet, and setting up cameras that
followed a group of co-eds at all moments throughout their private lives
("Voyeur Dorm"). [BRUNKER, M., 10-9-2000]
If Mark Kreloff of
Colorado-based New Frontier Media is Jewish too (his Executive Vice
President, in any case, is Michael Weiner) [ACCOLA, J., 5-21-2000, p. 1G] as
many as seven of the NBC's ten star Internet pornographers may be Jewish.
(Mark Bruder, president of Santa Monica, California-based Cable
Entertainment Distributors is also a porn supplier to New Frontier
Media.) [ACCOLA, J. 5-21-2000, p. 1G] Per the 2.5% Jewish percentage of the
American population, all things being equal, 7 of 225, not 7
of 10, prominent pornographers should be expected to be Jewish.

Still another major Internet pornographic Cohen -- not to be
confused with Benjamin -- is Stephen. This second Cohen was successfully
sued for stealing the Internet URL "sex.com" from a man named Gary
Kremen. Kremen had never envisioned the domain name to be a pornographic
home. Cohen, after forging papers to seize the site, and developing an
elaborate take over scheme, built sex.com into the premiere Internet
smut base, grossing $100 million a year. As the online journal "wired.com"
notes about Cohen's history and character:

"Cohen was convicted in 1991 for posing as a lawyer in a bankruptcy
court in
a scheme to bilk an elderly woman's creditors out of $200,000.
According to
to court records, Cohen assumed the identity of several attorneys,
forged
phony deeds and cashiers checks, and attmpted to hide the woman's
assets ...
Cohen was sentenced to 46 months. It was his second conviction. In
1975,
he was found guilty of grand theft and check kiting ... Within eight
months of
his prison release, Cohen controlled [by fraud] the Sex.com domain name
...
By the late '80s, Cohen had set up a real-world meeting place for
French
Connection swingers at a home in Orange County, California. Hundreds of
couples met at 'The Club' on Friday and Saturday nights to swap
partners.
After neighbors complained, police arrested Cohen in 1990 on charges of
operating a sex club in a residential zone ... In January 1996,
[Cohen's
group] unveiled its bid to buy a Nevada brothel called Sheri's Ranch
and
transform it into a $100 million 'adult fantasy resort.' Named
Wanaleiya,
the Polynesian-themed resort would feature 500 exotic women who 'would
not hesitate to see to your comfort and pleasure.'" [BICKNELL, C.,
4-13-99]

Then there is Steve Hirsch, who owns Vivid Video. "Of all its
achievements," notes Los Angeles magazine,

"Vivid is most famous for refurbishing the appearance of the video
box, wrapping
it in the glossy-art look of a fashion advertisement that masks its
raunchy contents.
Single, Ferrari-driving Hirsch, who has built up the biggest-selling
adult-film business
in the Valley based on the idea of the old Hollywood studio system,
seems equally 'packaged.' Talking to him is like interacting with a
TelePrompter--his well-rehearsed CEO lines ("It is important for
us to make quality product, work with the best models, get our message
out") seem scripted by drones in next room. 'He's very intelligent,' says
every competitor of Hirsch's, yet after asking him for his thoughts,
you can't help
wondering what Hirsch is really thinking. Unlike [non-Jewish
pornographer Russ] Hampshire, Hirsch did not start out in fast food.
In the late '70s, his father quit a job
as a stockbroker to create one of the first X-rated video-distribution
companies in the
[San Fernando] Valley [today, the premiere pornography production
center on earth]. Hirsch worked in his dad's warehouse after high
school and foundedVivid with a partner in 1984. He was 23 years old. Today,
Hirsch's father
works in Vivid's sales division, his sister Marci heads
production, and Hirsch--who
is known for aggressively entering and dominating new markets--sits
poised to conquer
the new DVD technology that could eventually replace the video format,
as well as mainstream the adult-film industry once and for all." [GARDETA,
D., 12-98]

Then there is Steven Orenstein, head of a major porno production firm
called Wicked, like many, based in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley
(the premiere pornography production zone on the planet):

"Like [fellow Jewish pornographer Steve] Hirsch, Orenstein was
introduced
to the business by a parent. In his case, it was his mother, a
bookkeeper, who
took a job in accounting at an adult-magazine business and then later
helped her
son secure work at the same company. (Today, she does the books at
Wicked.)
Also like Hirsch, Orenstein came up through the industry, working a
series of jobs
until he struck out on his own, forming Wicked in 1993." [GARDETTA,
D., 12-98]

And we dare not omit Susan Block from
the long list of Jewish sex entrepreneurs. Block, a self-described "sex
expert," has an online porno site where she revels in a furious sex hustling
and narcissim, herself modeling scanty outfits and apparently living out her
porno portrait fantasies (caption to one photo: "Here Dr. Block is in her 'Cyberstars'
push-up bra, thong panties and sheer robe ensemble'). And here, at this
Internet version of her Dr. Susan Block Institute for the Erotic Arts and
Sciences, Block lists media commentary that describes her as "America's
hottest sex therapist," an "X-rated alternative to Leno, Letterman, and
Nightline" (she has a cable TV show), and "a happily-married, religiously
aware Jewish woman." [http://www.drsusanblock.com]

In 1998, reporter Carol Lloyd described the public opening of Ms.
Block's "Sex Institute":

"There must be an explanation for the scene taking place just five feet
away. A blond,
large-breasted woman and a massive black man are fornicating with
methodical, casual self-consciousness, like two body-builders pumping
iron after an injury. He is on top, banging away unhurriedly, holding
himself away from her with two knuckled fists
planted on either side of her hips. She doesn't touch him but fidgets
with a silver
vibrator while preening at the small live audience and the roving,
carnivorous camera.
The peanut gallery continues with its kibitzing, trying to make sense
of how such
an explicitly sexual spectacle -- the climax to an evening of broken
taboos -- can
be so deeply, utterly unsexy. The event seemed too good to pass up.
Dr. Susan
Block, a sex celebrity who is, among other items on a groaning résumé,
an advice
columnist, a maker of videos bearing such titles as 'The Fine Art of
Fellatio,' the
author of 'The 10 Commandments of Pleasure,' the holder of a doctorate
in
philosophy, a radio and cable access talk-show host and the
cleavage-friendly
poster child for all things sex-enlightening and self-promoting, was
throwing a
Valentine's Day party to celebrate the opening of her new sexual
institute, located
in an old 1920s speakeasy in the heart of downtown L.A.'s art,
fashion, financial
and convention district ... Max, Susan Block's self-declared
publicist, footman,
butler, husband and sex slave, offers to show me the art ... 'We've
got everything,'
he says proudly, then segues into interview mode. 'I'm the most
prosecuted publisher
in America. I've been prosecuted 20 times and I've spent 18 months in
jail.' He ticks
off the charges on his fingers. 'Industrial espionage, rack ordinances
(I put the first
pair of tits on the streets of L.A.), conspiracy to publish.'" [LLOYD,
C., 2-18-98]Yet another Jewish
pornography entrepreneur of considerable notoriety, David Friedman, owned
the Pussycat Theatre adult film movie house chain; in
California alone there were 47 of them. [FORD, p. 26] Friedman was also a
pioneer in the production of "soft-core" porn. Called the "Sultan of Sleaze"
and "America's Most Notorious Carpetbagger of Cinemadom," between 1958 and
1984 he made 58 full-length films including the likes of Blood Feast,
Ten Thousand Maniacs, and Scum of the Earth. [FRIEDMAN, D., p.
8, 10] Scum of the Earth, notes Friedman, was
"about a gang of pornographers ... who lure young college girls into posing
for 'feelthy pictures.'" [FRIEDMAN, D., p. 325] "Herschell
[Lewis] and I," says Friedman, "had a reputation in the
burgeoning exploitation film business of the early sixties. It was widely
known and agreed upon that Friedman-Lewis Productions could
generate more films per dollar than any other source." [FRIEDMAN, D., p.
325] (Other associates in his genre of film world included Howard Golden, S.
S. Millard, Louis Sonnery, and Irwin Joseph. Sam Katzman also had production
companies for quickly created movies, 4 Leaf and
Victory. So did Maurice Conn of Ambassador-Conn.)

The following is what Mikita
Brottman notes (complete with psychoanalytic analysis in her scholarly
volume Offensive Films: Towards an Anthropology of Cinema Vomitif)
about Herschell Lewis' contribution to film. He is responsible for the
introduction to popular culture of the grotesque gore movie:

"Made for a mere $24,000 in 1963, Herschell Gordon Lewis' infamous
Blood
Feast is regarded -- when it is regarded at all -- as the absolute
nadir of
exploitation cinema. Original publicity posters, declaring the film
'more
grisly than ever, in blood color,' promised its audience they
would 'Recoil
and Shudder' when witnessing 'the Slaughter and Mutilation of Nubile
Young Girls -- in a weird and horrendous Ancient Rite! ... Even
Herschell
Gordon Lewis has talked about the limitations of the actors' abilities
and the
fact that the script stresses gore at the expense of plausibility and
coherence --
there is something to be said for the film's transgression of classical
cinema's barriers and limitations ... The film opens with an attack on
a young
girl in the bath. Ramses [the villian] pokes out her eye with a sword,
then
hacks off her legs and wraps them in newspaper. His second victim,
Marcie
(Ashlyn Maretin, Playboy Playmate of April 1964), is making love to
to her boyfriend on the beach when she is attacked and murdered; her
brain
is removed, still quivering. A third girl (Astrid Olsen) is stalked to
a motel
where Ramses pulls her tongue out of her mouth with his bare hands ...
At
the time of its first release, Blood Feast was reviewed
extensively in Time, Newsweek and Variety, to almost universal distaste. Ever
since, it has
atttained the status of a cult classic as 'the infamous first gore
film' and
'the original splatter film' ... As for the less respectable face of
horror -- the slasher
movie -- the narrative foundation for this highly ritualized and
formulaic tale
are laid bare for the first time in 1963, in the story of Fuad Ramses
and his Blood Feast ... [which] stands as the ur-test for a long
tradition of
slasher and stalker film. To pick up once again on the psychoanalystic
metaphor, Blood Feast is the 'primal scene' of the slasher film
genre ...
Put in its simplest narrative terms, Blood Feast is the story of
a blood-thirsty
fiend, who sets about killing and mutiliating a series of sexually
attractive,
pubescent females one-by-one until only a single girl in the chain
remains alive."
[BROTTMAN, M., 1997, p. 79-80]

And what of the personal ethical life of Mr. Lewis? He was "an
ex-college professor with a Ph.D in English and the self-styled 'Wizard of
Gore,' [who] lost most of his capital in the courts when he was arrested for
his part in a fraudulent car rental agency, along with a series of other
mail fraud convictions, including a fake abortion referral agency and a
phony gas-saving device. The arrest brought his filmmaking career to an
abrupt end." ]BROTTMAN, M., 1997, p. 180]

More recently, Zalman King, "the soft-core impresario," has produced,
among other films, Female Perversions (directed by Susan
Streitfield) and Striptease (directed by Andrew Bergman). [MILLAX,
J., 5-23-97, p. 5] He also created the "popular erotic drama series, 'The
Red Shoe Diaries,' for Showtime cable television. "I don't consider this
soft porn," he told a reporter, "I would just call it erotic filmmaking."
[MENDOZA, N., 6-27-93, p. 75]
In the "B" movie
genre, among the best known is Roger Corman, whose father was Jewish. Film
critic Roger Ebert also notes three more Jews of prominence:
"AIP's
[American International Pictures] Samuel Arkoff and James Nicholson and the
early Joe Levine are the major 1960s figures in the
exploitation field,
but by the end of the decade ... [there was also] Joe
Solomon." [EBERT, p.
137]
Solomon's works
include Hell's Angels on Wheels. His "top director" was also Jewish
-- Bruce Kessler. [EBERT, p. 138] Legendary Hollywood hustler Joseph E.
Levine? He, says Steven Aronson,

The creator of Fritz the Cat, "the world's first X-rated
cartoon?" [DIAMOND, J., 7-6-92] Also Jewish: Ralph Bakshi, born in Palestine
before it became Israel. And as Jewish commentator Barbara Amiel notes about
filmmaker David Cronenberg:
"[His] new film
Crash has hit London like an unexploded bomb ...
The story of a group
of young people who get their kicks out of
watching stunt men
re-enacting car crashes or videos of famous
car accidents (Jayne
Mansfield, James Dean) has horrified the public
... Britain is in the
middle of a wave of self-righteous Puritanism and the notion that car
crashes could sexually excite people is something
'beyond depravity.'"
[AMIEL, B., 11-16-96, p. B6]

Then there is British filmmaker Mike Leigh (changed from Lieberman),
"dubbed Europe's best filmmaker by an American distributor." Leigh, who has
has "12 full-length films to his name, together with dozens of theatre and
television plays, plus lucrative television commercials for McDonalds," is

"the master of the grungy, the squalid, the sexually menacing and the
sexually
dissolute ... Young Mike himself joined a Jewish youth movement, went
to Israel and worked on a kibbutz ... Leigh presents his audience with
lavatories,
excrement and urine, farting, vomiting, abortions, nudity,
graffiti-infested lifts,
cannibalism, and, in his play Babies Grow Old ... your actual kitchen
sink."
[KAUFMAN, G., 2-11 96]

In 1988 prominent
Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli made Jewish news for allegedly
calling the Jewish producers of the film The Last Temptation of Christ
(the film, directed by a non-Jew, Martin Scorsese, attracted
widespread condemnation from conservative Christian groups) "Jewish cultural
scum in Los Angeles." Zeffirelli later denied those exact words, but still
attacked the film's producer, Lew Wasserman, Chairman of MCA,
as "a merchant on the lookout for dollars, and not, certainly, of quality
films that respect precise universalist values ... I ask Lew Wasserman, with
irony: What would he say if one day an Italian decided to make a film about
Abraham sodomizing Isaac?" [GRUBER, p. 7]
Hollywood-based
Christian activists Tim Penland and Larry Poland were hired by the Jewish
head of Universal, Tom Pollock, (Universal was
MCA's subsidiary that released the movie) and they later
co-authored a book about the company's exploitation of them. Hired (without
seeing the completed film) to mollify Christian lobbyist groups that were
uncomfortable with The Last Temptation, Penland and Poland felt
deceived and manipulated by Universal and soon joined the
protest against the film. Careful not to enflame anti-Jewish sentiment,
Poland nonetheless notes that "My observation is that the higher you go in
the power structure of film and television, the more Jewish the industry
becomes. If you don't believe me, checkout the corporate directors of the
ten biggest movie studios sometime." [POLAND, L., 1988, p. 141]
The Jewish community,
in so many ways influential in defining public morality (through activism in
enforcing a separation between "church and state," dominance in the upper
echelons of the mass media, pre-eminence in pornography, as well as
mainstream publishing, modern art, etc., as we will soon see) were the
subject of a national survey in 2000. According to the Jews and the
Public Square Project, researchers discovered the following percentages
of support of those surveyed for the following assertions:
Non-Jews
Jews Jewish "leaders"
Homosexuality is Wrong:
48% 23% 7%
Do you support "abortion
rights?" 56% 88%
96% Do you support the
displaying
of the Ten
Commandments
in public schools?
65% 38%
"Jews take a less
critical view," noted the surveys' researchers, "of homosexuality, abortion,
birth control and pornography than do Gentiles." [PAULSON, M., 7-15-2000, p.
B2] (Not surprisingly, the producers of herisque, "push the boundaries" gay
sitcom for Showtime in 2000 were Daniel Lipman and Ron Cowen). According to
another (1994) survey by the National Opinion Research Center at the
University of Chicago, Jews are also the most sexually promiscuous ethnic
group in America. According to their responses, 34% of American Jews have
had sex with more than 11 partners by age 18! [HALBERSTAM, p. 141] (As
non-Jewish journalist Ross Wetzsteon notes: "I've always been attracted to
Jewish women -- in fact, every long relationship I've ever had, including my
marriage, was with a Jewish woman ... With WASPs, the code seemed
unbreakable -- first date kiss at the door, second date clumsy feel in the
car, etc. etc., so you sensed your sexuality was rigidly sculpted; with
Jews, on the other hand, it wasn't a matter of 'an easy lay' -- it was the
feeling that whatever was going to happen sexually between you would happen,
clumsily, perhap, but at least spontaneously.") [WETZSTEON, R. SEPT 6-10,
1998]

Chaim Bermant explains traditional Jewish views about sex like this:

"One could also discern in some of the anti-Jewish agitation [in early
20th
century Christian Europe] more than a passing undertone of sexual
jealousy. The Jew, as we have seen, was thought to be in league with
the
devil and prone to every variety of dark practice, and what could be
darker
or more devilish than sex? (The Jew, in ancient times at least, also
had an
extravagant idea of the sexual tastes and aptitudes of the gentile. The
Talmud, for example, decreed that one shouldn't stable one's ass with
a non-Jew in case it should be buggered). That the Jew had and has
a robust sexual appetitte is well attested from even the most cursory
readings of the Bible, the Talmud, and more recent, if less sacred,
texts. 'Be fruitful and multiply' is the first commandment in the Torah
and what was traditionally regarded amongst Christians as a sordid if
necessary act was raised by the Rabbis to the level of a holy
sacrament.
But as the Rabbis themselves were to lament, it was carried to unholy
lengths." [BERMAN, C., 1977, p. 29]

A survey of Jewish Americans in 1989 also noted that "nearly one in
five respondents" elicited "skeptical responses" about the existence of God,
while "in the general American population, over nine out of ten affirm a
belief in God." [WERTHEIMER, J., 1993, p. 63]
The results of an
earlier 1980s study about the mores of the entertainment television elite,
the molders of popular culture, was published by three Jewish researchers in
1983. 104 prominent members of the Hollywood television world were formally
interviewed, randomly selected from a list by Hollywood "insiders" of "key"
people in the business, i.e., "Hollywood's most influential television
writers, producers and executives." 93% of those interviewed were found to
have had a "religious upbringing." Of these, 59% were raised "in the Jewish
faith." (7% of the total survey were not raised in a religious milieu. In
the context of Jewish pre-eminence in communist movements in the early and
mid-20th century, [see discussions earlier] it is safe to assume that a very
high percentage of these religiously unaffiliated were also Jewish). [LICHTER/LICHTER/ROTHMAN,
1983, p. 54-61]
75%, of the Hollywood
elite categorized themselves to be to the left of center politically; only
14% to the right. 97% agreed with a statement that women "have a right to
abortion," and only 20% agreed that "homosexuality is wrong." 51% disagreed with the statement that "adultery is wrong." Only 17%
of the Hollywood elite "strongly agreed that extramarital affairs are
wrong." 70% disagreed with the statement that "There is
too much sex on television." 72% disagreed with the
statement that "TV is too critical of traditional values."
Meanwhile, at the
same time, in a 1982 nationwide poll, only 27% of the American public called
themselves "liberal," 32% classified themselves as "conservative."
As the three Jewish researchers noted,
"The television
elite's social liberalism is also evidenced by their views on sex and morality
... On such issues as abortion, homosexual rights,
and extramarital sex,
their views diverge sharply from traditional values
... Television
creators emerge as upholders of the 'new liberalism' that
surfaced among upper
status cosmopolitan groups in the 1960s."
[LICHTER/LICHTER/ROTHMAN,
1983, p. 54-61]

Rothman and Lichter noted Jewish
influence in shaping popular culture, against the grain of dominant mores:

"Within the intellectual and artistic communities, Jews were also
far to the left of their non-Jewish colleagues in the 1930s and
1950s, and far more active in supporting communist or 'progressive'
causes. As Jews moved into the professions, government service,
the media, and academia, they served as a radical leaven for these
groups and for the ever larger number of Americans coming into
contact with them." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 331]
Jews have also been
prominent in Hollywood as communist activists, a tradition decidedly against
American popular opinion. As Neal Gabler noted in 1988:
"One leading
communist estimated that 50 per cent of the party's
members were Jews
during its heyday in the thirties and forties, and a large minority --
and sometimes a majority -- of the party leadership was Jewish. What was
true of the national party was even truer in Hollywood, where Jews
already formed a large part of the left-leaning artistic community."
[Ring Lardner, Jr., for example, himself a CP member, estimated
that two-thirds of the communists in Los Angeles were Jewish] [GABLER,
N., 1988, p. 331]

Dore Schary, prominent Hollywood mogul and national chairman of the
Anti-Defamation League from 1963-69, was among those with FBI files as a
"strong communist sympathizer." As Laird Wilcox notes:

"John Sanford, a Communist Party member and Hollywood writer who taught
with Schary at the Progressive Educational Center in Hollywood, CA,
sees Schary
as somewhat lesss principled. When Sanford's wife, Maggie, refused to
testify
before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Schary went after
her:
'Mention a few names. What does it hurt? Mention the names of people
who've been named already.' Sanford observed that Schary was 'one of
the biggest pricks in the
business.'" [WILCOX, L., 199, p.. 63]

"In 1952, before the Senate censured McCarthy, a Gallup Poll
demonstrated
that 56 percent of Catholics and 45 percent of Protestants approved of
McCarthy and his tactics, but that 98 percent of the Jews considered
him a menace
to the country." [PLESUR, M., 1982, p. 135]Noting the
predominance of a "small" group of Jews in the corrosion of America's
traditional moral order and American Jewish "leadership" in this role, in
1999 politically conservative Rabbi Daniel Lappin lamented that "decent,
ordinary Americans are forced to begin to question whether Jews are bad for
this country. I realize how inflammatory this statement is ... I do know
that I am not alone in this concern ... [LAPIN, D., 1999, p. 41] The
spokesmen for groups like the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Veterans of America
and Lesbian Task Force are all too often Jewish. Many of the member
organizations of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice are Jewish.
The membership of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a champion of
ultra-liberal causes, is disproportionately high in Jews. The ACLU's
leadership is almost reminiscent of a temple board meeting ... [LAPIN, D.,
p. 279] ... So many of the enthusiasts for the radical homosexual agenda,
increased immorality, and expanded abortion rights are Jewish." [LAPIN, D.,
1999, p. 293]

In 1999, the Gay Financial Network announced its list of the the "most
influential Gay and Lesbian Corporate Executives." At least four of the top
six ranked were Jewish, and they were all influential media moguls:

1) Kathy Levinson, president and COO of E*Trade
3) David Geffen, the CEO of Dreamworks
4) Barry Diller, the CEO of USA Networks
5) Hilary Rosen, president and CEO of the Recording Industry
Association
of America

(Lower on the list was Stephen Friedman [vice-president of public
affairs for
MTV]; Seth Radwell, CEO of Doubleday Interactive; David Kuhn, senior VP
and editorial director of Brill Media, and Steve Fuchs, president of
Hampton
Industries] [BAIM, T., 12-9-99]

"Mann also covers a wide range of ancillary topics, e.g., the history
and aesthetics of set design; the rise of Los Angeles's 'pansy
clubs,' and the special role of Jews (who
were more likely than gentiles to be open about their sexuality)."
[PUBLISHERS WEEKLY/amazon.com, 2001]

Chairman and CEO of Canada's first and only (2002) gay television
network, PrideVision? John Levy, formerly President and CEO of
Cableworks, "one of the first cable systems in Canada to launch high-spped
internet acces over cable." Levy also heads The Score, a TV sports
network, and "he is the majority shareholder in Headline Media Group,
Inc., the company that owns PrideVision TV." [http://pridevisiontv.com/aboutPV/decision.htm]

Reviewing a recent biography about Jewish homosexual Hollywood mogul
David Geffen, journalist Taki lashed out at the huge influence on public
morals exerted by the largely Jewish "Velvet Mafia," :

"I'm not surprised to read that Hollywood is dominated by a Velvet
Mafia of
rich homosexuals who demand sexual favors in return for work in the
movies. In
fact I would have been surprised if it were the other way around. Those
old
Mittel-Europa Jews who ran Tinseltown in its heyday established the
casting -couch
practice long ago; but, as they say, at least they did it with style
and with the
opposite sex. The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the
New
Hollywood is the title of an upcoming book by Tom King, a respected
Wall
Street Journal reporter who it seems has hit pay dirt -- and it's dirt,
all right --
with his expose of the unspeakable Geffen. Geffen invited King to write
a book
about his amazing rise to the top, and allegedly named dozens of former
boyfriends, many of them now famous stars. Indiscretion aside, Geffen
is
is a lowlife san pareil ... But what bothers me is not the
bestiality and arrogance
of the Velvet Mafiosi. It is the message they send out through their
movies ...
Geffen, of course, denies there is such a thing as a homosexual cabal,
and, typically, charges anti-Semitism. According to King's book,
[Jewish]
friends like Barry Diller, Sandy Gallin and Calvin Klein, among many
others,
keep a low profile but apparantly indulge in the sexual bacchanals that
go
with the territory. Alleged weekend-long orgies fueled by drugs at
which Geffen and
his powerful buddies run a 'meat market' selecting young men for sex
are apparently described in detail in King's opus ... Hollywood has
never been
a moral place, far from it, but until the 1960s and 70s it preached a
hell of
a moral lesson. God, the family, patriotism, even Mom were sacrosanct.
Now it's the exact opposite. Criminals are sympathetically portrayed,
cops
always negatively; people who think same-gender sex is wrong are
fascists."
[TAKI, v.13, no. 10]

In Russia, Olga Zhuk ("I'm Jewish and I'm a dyke") has led the
recent Soviet out-of-the-closet homosexual movement. As London's The
Guardian noted in 1992:

"Olga Zhuk can claim the dubious distinction of being the only woman
in the
Soviet Union ever to have been charged under Article 121 of the Penal
Code -
the law that criminalises sodomy between men. It happened in November
1990,
after Zhuk and a handful of other lesbians and gay men from Leningrad
took a
very deep breath and attempted to register Russia's first ever lesbian
and gay
organisation - the Tchaikovsky Foundation - with the city
authorities ... As president
and perceived 'ringleader' behind the Tchaicovsky Foundation,
Zhuk was publicly
denounced in the Lensoviet and charged with sodomy. But the case never
came
to court, the charges dropped after radical lawyers succeeded in
convincing the
chief prosecutor that lesbians were biologically incapable of
sodomising each other."
[MCKENNA, N., 3-31-92, p. 21] Moving along in the
religious sphere, in 1999, the aforementioned Rabbi Daniel Lapin,
representing a veryrare Jewish perspective, addressed
the systematic defamation of the Christian community by major Jewish
organizations, declaring that
"I am appalled by
the great injustice being perpetrated by those Jewish
organizations [the
Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Congress, World Jewish
Congress, etc.] that engage in anti-Christian bigotry.
Although many of
them were founded explicitly to fight bigotry, and for many years did
just that, today the shrill rhetoric and hate-filled
propaganda found in
their direct mail is discriminatory and divisive. The very same Jewish
organizations would be the loudest protesters
were anything
remotely similar being said by non-Jews about Jews."
[LAPIN, D., 1999,
p. 2]

As Yechiel Eckstein, also a rabbi, further noted in 1997:

"Hollywood's impact on our popular culture is profound and undeniable
...
More often than not, filmmakers seem to go out of their way to depict
people
of faith in the worst possible light. And while Jews and Judiaism are,
by
and large, portrayed favorably and reverentially, Christians,
particularly
Evangelical Protestants and devout Cathlics, do not fare so well. One
is
left with the distinct impression that Hollywood has a very real and
pervasive
anti-Christian bias. How else do we explain the fact that Christian
clergy --
when they are portrayed at all -- are usually shown engaging in morally
reprehensible behavior? Or the fact that Christian symbols are
associated with
characters who prey upon society? Or that the crimes of various
antagonists are
shown to be religiously motivated? In Primal Fear, for example,
the local
archbishop is murdered by one of the waifs he exploited in his
self-made
porn films. The lead character in Priest is shown in a
homosexual tryst with a
The sadistic nurse in Misery wears a cross; the rapist in Eye
for an Eye sports
one as well. A killer played by Harry Connick Jr. in Copycat
repeatedly invokes
the names of Jesus. Christian beliefs and symbols are often belittled
by Hollywood
producers and writers. The cherished symbols of faith are put to
blasphemous uses.
Indeed, if there is a Christian character in a film, he is usually
depicted as a fool,
a liar, a cheater, a diabolical murderer or a crazy person ... Could
Hollywood
producers ridicule and malign Christians with impunity if the Christian
community
organized its own equivilant of the Anti-Defamation League?" [ECKSTEIN,
Y.
2-14-97, p. 4] (Executive Producer of Primal Fear? Also Jewish.
Howard Koch, Jr.).

Other noteworthy anti-Catholic films from Hollywood include The
Runner Stumbles (1979) about a priest who falls in love with a nun and
then goes to trial for her murder, Monsignor (1982) about a Catholic
prelate who works with the Mafia, Agnes of God (1985) starts out with
a nun giving birth to a baby and then killing it, The Penitent (1988)
where the lead character joins a brutal Catholic cult, Last Rites
(1988) where a priest gets involved in murder and the the criminal
underground, We're No Angels (1989) where two prison convicts escape
and pretend to be priests,and The Pope Must Die (1991) which
heralds everything from a Pope "harem" to illegal arms deals.
Anti-Protestant movies include Crimes of Passion (1984) about a
despicable skid-row evangelist, Poltergeist II (1986) features a
deranged preacher, The Vision (1987) about a Christian cult that
plots to take over the world, Light of Our Day (1987) about a
fraudulent minister, The Handmaid's Tale (1990) about a group of
Christian fundamentalist fanatics who rise to political power in the U.S.,
and The Rapture (1991) where a born-again decides it's her religious
duty to murder her own child. [O'BRIEN, P.; citing MEDVED, 2000/2001, p.
290-295]

Mainstream Hollywood's drastically different portrayals of Christianity
and Judaism today is noted by Jewish film critic Michael Medved:
"I can't think of
any film that has portrayed the Chasidic community [of Satmar, Bobov,
and other 'fraud and corruption' fame we have
met earlier] where
that portrayal has been anything but affectionate... If you compare the
treatment of the Jewish religion to the way
Catholics and
Protestants are shown ... well, Jews are not treated as savagely ... The
only place where religion is treated reverentially is where it's
considered exotic, and that is the case with the hasids."
[EIKIN, p. 29]
"One strain of
Judaism," concur Jonathan and Judith Pearl, "has been most prominent and
visible [on television] ... The appeal of Hasidic Judaism to television
undoubtedly lies in its exoticism." [PEARL/PEARL p. 94]
This loving
treatment of Jewish Orthodoxy ("Fiddler on the Roof," et al) is evident in
modern Jewish fiction as well. "Orthodox Jewish characters and settings,"
noted Paula Hyman and Deborah Moore in 1997, "now enjoy an unprecedented and
variegated focus in new American Jewish fiction ... The fascination with
Orthodox settings extended to the mystery novels and to popular fiction as
well." [HYMAN, p. 422] "In the fall of 1985," noted Edward Shapiro, "the
New York magazine even published a lengthy three-part essay titled 'Holy
Days,' which described in favorable terms a Hassidic sect in Brooklyn."
[SHAPIRO, Jewish, p. 167] "Orthodoxy," noted Jack Wertheimer in 1993,
"has been the beneficiary of much media coverage and has learned to exploit
such coverage. Unlike earlier coverage of some Hasidic sects in the general
American press, which focused on their exoticism, more recent reports have
emphasized the warm communal spirit and decent values promoted by the
Orthodox world." [WERTHEIMER, J., 1993, p. 122] [See chapter 2 for an
analysis of the spirit and values of this Orthodox world]
Robert Avrech is
believed to have become Hollywood's "first Orthodox screenwriter" in the
late 1970s. By 1999, noted the Baltimore Jewish Times, "more than 30
Orthodox writers now work in the industry, particularly in television."
(David Sacks, for example, also an Orthodox Jew, is also the Executive
Producer of the TV series 3rd Rock From the Sun, Michael
Glouberman is the co-Executive Producer of Fox's Malcolm in the
Middle, and Etan Cohen has even written scripts for the risque MTV
cartoon series Beavis and Butt-head.) [UMANSKY, El, 2-18-2000,
p. 21] Real Hasidim often appear in Robert Avrech's movies. "Although movies
are taboo in the Haredi community," noted the Times, "large Chasidic
families appeared [in Avrech's last film] as extras for the $200 per day,
per person fee. [The families] promised each other they would keep their
secret." An earlier Avrech film was Body Double, which he described
as "extremely wild, sexy, very violent -- a cult classic." [HIRSCH, R.
6-4-99, p. 18]
Even influential
horror movies exploring a powerful Satan in a Christian context
(particularly, Rosemary's Baby [1968; directed by Roman Polanski,
novel by Ira Levin], where the Devil inseminates the lead character, and
William Freidkin's The Exorcist (1974), where the lead character,
possessed by the devil, stabs herself in the crotch with a crucifix) were
Jewish creations. The National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures condemned
Rosemary's Baby, noting "the perverted use which the film made of
fundamental Christian beliefs, especially surrounding the birth of Christ,
and its mockery of religious persons and practices." [LEAMING, 1981, p. 88]
Defamation of, and
attack upon, the Christian world view is evidenced throughout the Jewish
entertainment community. Gordon Davidson, also Jewish, has been the first
and only artistic director (for 33 years) of the Center Theatre Group at the
Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency notes
Davidson's very first directorial effort:
"For the inaugural
drama of the new theatrical venture, the young Davidson decided to
stage, and direct himself, 'The Devils,' John Whiting's tale of a
libertine priest, a nun and their sexual fantasies. The Los Angeles
Catholic Archdiocese and Davidson's bosses at the Los Angeles
County Board of Supervisors were suitably outraged." [TUGEND,
T., 3-6-2000, p. 11]

(This quote, by the way, is from an article about Davidson by the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency entitled "Award-Winning Theatre Director
Likens His Role to That of a Rabbi").

Peter Novick notes a similar story in 1964: a play (The Deputy)
about Pope Pius XII and his alleged silence about the Holocaust:

"Almost all Jewish organizations, particularly the Anti-Defamation
League
and the American Jewish Committee, were heavily involved in
interreligious dialogue, whose agenda was 'make nice' and 'can't we
all just get along?' The Deputy was definitely not nice, not a
contribution to getting along. Catholic spokesmen publicly and
privately called on their Jewish dialogue partners to
put pressure on the Jewish producer and director to cancel the play,
or at
least to join them in denouncing it. Implicitly they were saying that
if the shoe
was on the other foot -- if what was at issue was a play sullying the
reputation
of the world's most venerated Jewish leader -- Jews wouldn't hesitate
to call
on them." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 143]Conversely, Jewish
themes in the largely Jewish entertainment world are portrayed in loving and
respectful terms. In 1999, for example, rabbi Jonathan Pearl (who holds a
PhD in Judaic Studies) and his wife published a volume about Hollywood's
treatment of Jewish themes and characters on television. The Pearls note
that
"While Jews have been
known for millions as the People of the Book,
they could also well
have been called, for the past fifty years, the People of Television ...
Contrary to the commonly held inaccurate belief that serious Jewish issues
and truly Jewish characters rarely find their way into popular TV
shows, our intense research -- over the course of fifteen years and many
thousands of hours of viewing shows -- has revealed that literally hundreds of
television dramas and comedies have featured Jewish themes over the past
half century ... [PEARL/PEARL, p. 1] ... By the
end of his twelve
years on television, Archie Bunker, America's best- known bigot, had come
to raise a Jewish child in his home, befriend a black Jew, go into
business with a Jewish patron, enroll as a
member of Temple Beth
Shalom, eulogize his close friend at a Jewish funeral, hosted a
Sabbath dinner, participate in a bar mitzvah ceremony,
and join a group to
fight synagogue vandalism ... [This show] was far from unusual. Since
the inception of network television half a century ago, hundreds of
popular TV shows have portrayed Jewish themes... In nearly every
instance, the Jewish issues have been portrayed with respect, relative
depth, affection, and good intentions ... [PEARL/PEARL p. 5] ... It follows,
then, that most American television viewers, especially those who have little
personal contact with Jews, gain a large portion of their ideas about
Jews and Judaism from the small screen." [PEARL/ PEARL p. 6]
In 1999, an
HBO feature-length movie was aired about the life of famous Jewish
mobster Meyer Lansky. (Lansky's murderous associate-gangster, Bugsy Siegel,
was immortalized in not one, but threeHollywood feature
films about him in 1991 alone: The Marrying Man, Mobsters, and
Bugsy). Echoing the times, when Jewish martyrological legend
has become history, even this vicious Jewish thug, Lansky, who
headed the greatest criminal empire in American history, is portrayed as
first and foremost a victim, the innocent butt of horrible
Gentile anti-Semitism and ever entwined, and loyal, to the noble Jewish
people. As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency notes, "The two opening
scenes set the tone. The first shows the seventy-year old Lansky amid the
cluttered tombstones of Jerusalem's Mount of Olives, trying to buy a space
for himself next to his grandparents' graves. In a flashback, the seven-year
old Meyer Suchowljansky [Lansky] watches in frozen horror as a pious, old
Jew is butchered by Polish peasants during a pogrom in his native Grodno."
Later, the film shows Lansky's "muscular pal Bugsy [Siegel] defend
him from Irish bullies." [TUGEND, T. 2-22-99] Such
material begins, and frames for apologetic context, the mobster's life of
crime.
As explanation for
this special treatment, we may look to Lester Friedman who observes that
"writers of films featuring Jewish characters have, from the story idea to
the final cut, historically faced a gauntlet of highly placed Jewish
executives." [FRIEDMAN, L., p. 3] Or as Jewish film
scholar Patricia Erens frames it:
"Despite their small
numbers in the United States, Jews have enjoyed an advantage
unequalled by any other ethnic group in America -- a virtual control over
their own self-image on the screen." [ERENS, P., 1980, p. 114]

As the Jewish Bulletin noted
about Jewish executive Jerry Offsay, president of programming at Showtime
Networks in 2002,

"Two or three times he has passed on a script that has portrayed Jews
negatively. 'I can't stop it from being made, but I'm not going to be
the person
who brings it forth, 'he says. In a simiar vein, he mentions a Showtime
film -- he
doesn't want the name printed -- in which the director was planning to
cast an
'idenifiably Jewish character' in the patently villainous role. 'I
didn't want
a Jewish guy playing such a virulently hateful character,' Offsay
admits."
[SCHLEIER, C., 5-29-98, p. 34]

Samples of Jewish-themed programs from Offsay include a play "about the
way in which a Jewish family copes with the possibility of a gay child being
born," a 1943-era Warsaw uprising story, and 'Rescuers: Stories of Courage'
"about non-Jews who risked their lives rescuing victims of the Holocaust." [SCHLEIER,
C., 5-29-98, p. 34]"Jewish theatre and
film producers," noted Jewish author James Jaffe in 1968, "have created the
wholly mythological figure of the gentle, inoffensive, philosophical,
shoulder-shrugging Jew, ready to give the hero the benefit of his wise
warm-hearted advice. [Jewish film critic] Pauline Kael detects him in the
kindly old pharmacist in West Side Story, and points out that
his chief function is to convince the gentile world how harmless the Jew
is." [JAFFE, J., 1968, p. 62]

During World War II, despite the fact that Jews were a tiny American
minority, they were amply represented as soldiers in movies: "There was the
all-but-obligatory inclusion of Jews in Hollywood platoon rosters: a
Feingold in Bataan, a Weinberg in Air Force, A Diamond in
Pride of the Marines, a Jacobs in Objective! Burma, an Abraham in
Action in the North Atlantic, and a Greenbaum in The Purple Heart."
[NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 33]Hyper-sensitivity to
Jewish themes has a long history in Hollywood, particularly since the World
War II (Holocaust) era. Even aside from Jewish insider domination in the
shaping of movies, Jews have been so protective of their portrayals in the
mass media that in 1948 an umbrella group for Jewish American organizations,
the National Community Relations Advisory Council, instituted, in
collaboration with the major Hollywood studios, the "Motion Picture
Project." "It functioned," notes Neal Gabler,
"to give each of the
major Jewish organizations a piece of Hollywood... [Its activities
involved] reviewing scripts, cajoling producers, keeping the big Jewish
organizations informed of any movie that might help or hurt the Jews ... Some
charged that an accusation could be made that a
'Jewish group was
trying to censor the industry,' which, in fact, was
exactly what it was
trying to do." [GABLER, N., 1988, p. 303-304]
But even before this
self-censoring organization was created, in 1947, Hollywood carefully
policed its depiction of Jews for the public. Frederic Wakeman's novel
The Huckster, for example, (based largely upon the life of MCA
mogul Jules Stein) was made into a movie by MGM. Dennis
McDougal notes that
"In Wakeman's novel,
the newly respectable Dave Lash [the Stein character] was a poor
Jew who clawed his way to the top by playing footsie with the Mob,
then made up for it by giving generously to charities that fought
anti-Semitism ... In the film version, there is no hint that Lash,
played by grandfatherly character actor Edward Arnold, is Jewish or
that his right-hand man is the conniving, deceitful agent of the novel.
The MGM script transformed Lash's odious [Jewish] chief lieutenant into
an eager Irish string bean named Freddie Callahan... The movie gives not
hint that Arnold's character is Jewish or that his early criminal
conniving had anything to do with being Jewish."
[MCDOUGAL, 1998, p.
127-128]
In another such
case, in 1945, Jewish screenwriter Barney Glazer struggled with
Warners Brothers executive Jeff Wald (also Jewish) about a film to made
called Rhapsody in Blue. Originally a play written by Jewish
playwright Clifford Odets, Glazer formally objected to his superiors that
the lead character (Jewish in the original version) was now
Italian-American. The plan to delete the Jewishness of the character, noted
Glazer, was that Warners wanted to do "a study of young genius;
that for the greater part of it our hero must be portrayed as an out-and-out
little sonofabitch; that the same color and sympathy can be had from say an
Italian-American family portrait." [BEHLMER, p. 266] Glazer's complaint was
to no avail: the lead character in the film appeared as Italian-American.
In 1994, Newsweek
noted another such Hollywood ethnic switching:
"When the play 'Other
People's Money' was made into a movie, the character of a
Jewish corporate raider who takes over a family business was changed
into a generic 'ethnic' played by Danny DeVito [of Italian
heritage]." [SOLOMON, J., 5-23, 94, p. 50]

One of the comedians in the British group Monty Python, Terry Gilliam,
noted what happened to one character in their movie The Life of Brian:

"We cut Otto out ...[Monty Python member] Eric was very keen to cut it
and I think it was because he was living in Hollywood and worried
about
offending 'Jews who run Hollywood' or because he works in Hollywood
and half his friends are Jewish. I don't know. I thought, 'This is
crazy. We
made a film to offend everybody! If we're going to offend the
Christians,
come on! We ended up cutting it out ..." [HEARST NEWS MEDIA]

Although Jews played a dominant role
in Hollywood (and American) communism, including Soviet espionage [see
earlier citations; Hollywood Jewish communist screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr.,
estimated, for example, that two-thirds of the Communist Party members in
Los Angeles were Jewish] [GABLER, N., 1988, p. 331], Jewish organizations
were active in lobbying the largely Jewish film community to keep that
depiction off the movie screens. As Peter Novick writes,

"Jewish organizations, throughout the fifties and well into the
sixties, worked on
a variety of fronts to prevent, or at least limit, the association of
Jews with
Communism in the public mind. Thier principal co-operative venture was
the
'Hollywood Project,' in which they jointly employed a West Coast
representative
who lobbied movie producers to avoid any unsympathetic reprsentations
of Jews.
A good deal of this lobbying dealt with the Jew-Communist issue. The
producer
of I Married a Communist promised to see that no Communist
character had a 'name
that can even remotely be construed as Jewish.'" [NOVICK, P., 1999, p.
95]

Fearing the spread of anti-Jewish hostility (especially in the context
of a Hitler-style fascism), Jewish organizations were also influential in
policing Hollywood film content in the 1930s. Rabbi William H. Fineshriber,
for example, "who became active in film industry affairs in the early 1930s
on behalf of the Reform Central Conference of Amreican Rabbis," took
personal credit for convicing MGM to abandon a proposed film called It
Can't Happen Here. [HERMAN, F., MARCH 2001, p. 66] As Felicia Herman
notes about this era:

"Although the ADL [Anti-Defamation League ] and AJC [American Jewish
Committee]
occasionally corresponded on their own with film industry figures, by
far the
closest relationship between a Jewish organization and the Jews in the
film
industry existed through the LAJCC [Los Angeles Jewish Community
Committee].
Leon Lewis, the former national secretary of the ADL, had created the
LAJCC
in 1934 as an autonomous, self-appointed umbrella organization of local
representatives of all of the major national Jewish organizations as
well as local
Jewish social and communal leaders. Many of the LAJCC's members enjoyed
personal and professional links to Jews in the film industry, and a
week after the
LAJCC's founding, the organization created a Motion Picture Committee
comprised
of prominent Jewish studio executives like Irving Thalberg, Jack
Warner, Joseph
Schenck, and Harry Cohn. These men reguarly met with with Lewis to
discuss film
issues relevant to the Jewish community and to contribute funds to the
LAJCC's
work in ferreting out local antisemites and Nazi sympathizers. Lewis
thus became
the point man for Jewish-Hollywood relations, and often at the behest
of ADL and AJC, he utilized the connections fostered by the LAJCC's
Motion Picture Committee
to try to shape films with Jewish content." [HERMAN, F., MARCH 2002, p.
68]

A planned film about Hitler, entitled Mad Dog of Europe, was
eventually shelved after Jewish concern about Jewish predominance in
Hollywood and how such a movie could backlash Jewish interests. "The film's
would-be producers were all Jewish," says Herman,

"and the film made particular reference to Nazi antisemitism. Upon
investigating the project, Jewish leaders concluded that the script was
'so fanatical' that 'there may be
a very unhappy kickback from it. They therefore utilized many of the
tools at their disposal to prevent the film from being produced. The
Jewish efforts to stop Mad
Dog of Europe received little public attention, just as Jewish
leaders desired: as much
as they could, they kept their dealings with the motion picture
industry a quiet affair, attempting to stave off the charge that the
Jews were 'controlling' Hollywood."
[HERMAN, F., 2001, p. 69]

The Judeocentric, ardently pro-Israel Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los
Angeles also plays today a significant role in censoring prospective movies
with Jewish themes or characters. As Josh Spector notes:

"Rabbi Abraham Cooper is not your typcal Hollywood power broker. But a
a thumbs down from Cooper and his colleagues at the Simon Wiesenthal
Center recently proved enough to convince Paramount Classics to back
away from a potential distribution deal with this year's Sundance grand
jury prize winner, The Believer [about a real-life Jew who
became a neo-Nazi
leader], proving just how influential special interest groups have
become in the
Hollywood machine ... Parmount's decision to consult the rabbi and his
colleagues at the Wiesenthal Center is not unprecedented. The Los
Angeles-
based organization has been active in the entertainment industry for a
number
of years, often reviewing scripts and consulting with filmmakers and
studios
on Jewish-related productions ... 'This is a nightmare,' [The
Believer's
director/writer, Henry Bean, who is Jewish] said, 'The fear of
political correctness
is encroaching on every aspect of the artistic process.'" [SPECTOR, J.,
2001] Curiously, even the
old Hayes Office, the censorial organization that for decades oversaw
Hollywood films, apparently maintained a double standard in its policing of
ethnic defamations. As Gerald Gardner notes about the (Jewish) Marx
Brothers: "The Marx Brothers seem to have been immune to charges of ethnic
humor. The same censors who made Walt Disney change the feigned Jewish
accent of the Wolf in The Three Little Pigs, raised no
objection to Chico's improbable Italian accent, his absurd, tight-fitting
jacket and pointed hat." [GARDNER, G., 1987, p. 115]
Apparently
Italian-Americans have often served as Jewish-dominated Hollywood's dumping
grounds. Aside from the considerable film/television maligning of
Christianity, Islam, Arabs, and other religious and ethnic genres, a 1982
report by the Commission for Social Justice noted that "television is
lacking in portrayals of positive Italian American role models." (Likewise,
a 1983 TV commentator complained that "never have so many Blacks appeared on
television, yet never has their image been so stereotyped." [PEARL/PEARL p.
9-10]) In 1999, an Italian-American, Bill Dalcerro, wrote an editorial in
the Los Angeles Times about the HBO-produced TV program "The
Sopranos." This series, complained Dalcerro, "not only revels in negative,
cartoonish images of a specific community -- Italian Americans -- but was
congratulated for doing so last week by a flurry of Emmy nominations from
the television industry. How can this be?" [DELCERRO, B., 7-26-99, p. F3]
Perhaps, one wonders, because both the show's creator/executive producer,
David Chase, and its producer, Todd Kessler, are Jewish, as well as a
majority of important figures in the television industry.
In 1980, Daniel Golden
noted that:
"The dominant
portrayal of Italians in American film is within the gangster genre, a cinematic
heritage that stretches from Little Caesar (1931) to its
apotheosis in both
parts of The Godfather.... Indeed, much early anti-Italianism is
merely a continuation of anti-Catholicism." [GOLDEN,
D., 1980, p. 77-78]
Golden, a Jewish
author, blames such bias on "WASP America's obsession and prejudices against
'foreign influence.'" [GOLDEN, D., 1980, p. 75]
Hollywood Jewry's
stereotypes of the Irish? As Dennis Clark and William Lynch note:
"For the millions,
the revelations and fantasies produced by the motion picture industry
during the twentieth century were powerful formative influences ... The
fact that Jews played such a vital and extensive role in the film industry
had both positive and negative effects upon Irish participation ... The
Irish in the movies often were the Irish as seen by Jews, with the
disparity and distortion that always attends one group's portrayal of
another. For example, Jewish families were seen as close and
peaceful, though tense, but Irish families were usually seen as rude and
violent." [CLARK/LYNCH, 1980, p. 98, 103]

As Jewish comedian Milton Berle declared: "The Irish ignore anything
they can't fight or drink!" [BERLE, M., 1996, p. 303]Generic Slavs? As
Caroline Golab observed in 1980,
"The Slavs were not,
until recently, popular victims of Hollywood's fascinating
propensity to stereotype. Of the thousands of movies produced in the past
sixty years, probably less than two dozen contain
Slavic-Americans as major or minor characters. What is missing in quantity, however,
is more than made up in quality. American film not only helped
perfect the Slavic stereotype, but was largely responsible for
nationalizing it ... In its heyday, vaudeville made
frequent use of the
caricatured Jew, Italian, or Irishman. The Slav made infrequent
appearances, if he made any at all. Only in the Yiddish theatre did
he reappear again and again, usually as the poor, dumb, easily duped
peasant ... Slavs have such low social standing that, more often than
not, they are portrayed as being one thin line
above the blacks in
the American social hierarchy." [GOLAB,
C., 1980, p. 135,
140]
An angry professor of
Ukrainian descent, Lubomyr Prytulak, was motivated to create his own
Internet website (Ukraine Archives) after watching an October 1994 CBS 60
Minutes report that unjustly defamed Ukraine and Ukrainians with a
one-sided emphasis on that country's alleged anti-Semitism. The program was
entitled "The Ugly Face of Freedom" and Prytulak began an online project to
refute 60 Minutes' biased view of Ukrainian history. At the time of
the show's airing, complains Prytulak, all the principals in the CBS
hierarchy were Jewish, including Laurence Tisch, chairman and CEO; Eric Ober,
president of CBS; Dan Hewitt, Executive Producer of 60 Minutes;
Jeffrey Fagar, Producer of the "Ugly Faces of Freedom"; and Morley Safar,
the host of the report. Two people interviewed in the program, defaming the
Ukrainian people, Simon Wisenthal and Yaakov Bleich, were also Jewish. [PRYTULAK,
UKRAINE ARCHIVE]
Andrew Gregorovich,
also of Ukrainian descent, for thirty years the head of the Toronto library
system, responded with his own outrage." The program about Ukraine, he
wrote, "is an amazing program because after Morley Safar's first two
sentences it becomes a textbook example of distortion and propaganda about
the relationship of Ukrainians with Jews." The program, the author notes,
was apparently timed to coincide with "the first official visit to North
America by the President of Ukraine." Among the many outrageous inaccuracies
in the CBS program, the Ukrainian word "Zhyd" (which is not
pejorative and means "Jew") is translated as "kike." Likewise, at one point
in the program Safar declares that "Thousands of Ukrainians joined the
[Nazi] SS and marched off to fight for Nazism." "This is said
simultaneously," notes Gregorovich,
"with marching men
who four times in the program shout 'Slava natsiyi!'
(Glory to the
nation!) To the viewer this sounds as if it is a cheer for Nazism but all it
reflects is the phonetical similarity of the sound of the
Ukrainian word for
nation to Nazi. The Ukrainians did not join the
Galicia Division
No. 14 (Waffen-Grenadierdivision der SS) to fight 'for Hitler' as
Safer said. They were fighting against the USSR and
the Russians in
order to win independence for Ukraine."
[GREGOROVICH, 1994]
Even one of the men
interviewed on 60 Minutes, Rabbi Yaakov Bleich, an American Jew,
later stated that "I feel that the broadcast did not convey the true state
of affairs in Ukraine. I also would like to state unequivocally that my
words were quoted out of the context that they were said." [GREGOROVICH,
1994] Even the Executive Director of the American Jewish
Committee, David Harris, felt moved to note that the 60 Minutes
program about the Ukraine was "a simplistic and stereotypical image." [KUROPAS,
M., 1995] Another individual interviewed on the program, Cardinal
Lubachivsky, head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, complained that "I must
also add that my office was misled as to the actual thrust of the report ...
Mr. Fagar [the producer] presented the piece as one about 'post-Communist
Ukraine' ... I can only deduce that the goal of the report was to present
all Ukrainians as rabid anti-Semites." A few hundred people of Ukrainian
heritage demonstrated for a retraction of the program (to no avail) at CBS
studios in Washington and New York. [KUROPAS, M., 1995]
(In 2000, there even
arose a controversial Internet web site posted by people of Serbian descent,
calling themselves the Serbian Defense League. This site, especially shrill
in its anti-Jewish polemic, holds the Jewish community guilty of injustices
against, and defamations of, the Serbian community). [ONLINE: COMPUSERB.com]
In 2000 too, an angry
author of Native American descent, Olin Tezcatlipoca, noted the hypocrisy of
Steven Spielberg's loving and sacred treatment of Jewry in his films and the
defamatory historical inaccuracies concerning another people in his firm's
film "Road to El Dorado":
"Steven Spielberg's
DreamWorks (the producer), and UniversalStudios (the distributor) [owned by the
Jewish Bronfman family]
present the story of
two Spaniards who stow away to the New
World in the 16th
century and wind up saving the village of El Dorado from a
powerful priest intent on carrying out human
sacrifices. This is a
an outrage, given the reality that the Spanish conquerors were
responsible for the genocide of 23 million of our people -- killing 95%
of our population." [TEZCATLIPOCA, O., 4- 10-2000, p. F3]
[One may also wonder here, of course, about the Jewish subtext of a
priest who celebrates ritual murder].
As Gretchen Bataille
and Charles Silet observed in 1980:
"Hollywood has
presented an extremely distorted picture of American Indian peoples. From
our childhood on, Hollywood has bombarded us with cartoons and
movies which show the Indian as the 'bad guy' or, at best, a
tragic anachronism from out of the past." [BATAILLE/ /SILET, 1980, p. 36]
In a surprising
corner, Hollywood's popular depictions of Jewish women has even engendered
outrage from Jewish females who feel defamed. One 1998
study by the Zionist women's Hadassah organization complained that in
Hollywood Jewish women are commonly portrayed in the mass media as "pushy,
controlling, selfish, unattractive, materialistic, high maintenance,
shallow, domineering, who nag their husbands and spend all their time
cooking and shopping." [MARKS, M., 4-23-98, p. 5] Rarely
publicly spoken, the essence of this Jewish women's outrage is merely an
in-house, intra-Jewish psychological war: Jewish males
versus Jewish females. The "Jewish American Princess" and nagging Jewish
mother stereotypes are, after all, Jewish creations, perpetuated by
Hollywood's Jewish male elite who should recognize either the truths or
inaccuracies of the subject.
Ironically, despite
sensitizing America to the singular righteousness of Judaism, the rampant
graphic violence celebrated as entertainment by today's television and
motion picture producers has begun to pay disturbing dividends for Jewish
efforts to sensitize people to the Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust. In
1994, for example, a group of 69 inner-city Oakland, California, high school
students on a field trip to see Schinder's List were evicted from the
theatre for rowdy -- and celebratory -- behavior during the most gruesome
Nazi murder scenes. [BARTOV, p. 49-50]
In July 1991, there
was a "grand opening" of Time-Warner's Comedy Central cable
channel, a joint venture with Viacom (also Jewish-owned -- see
later. Warner is also notorious for its distribution of some of
the most anti-social and vicious "rap" songs in history, including a song
called "Cop Killa" which evoked widespread condemnation and public protest
towards the mega-corporation). The show aired at 5:45 PM, a prime time for
children. Richard Clurman describes the program with disgust:
"[The]
narrator-host on the roof of an office building screamed: 'The
smell of urine is
wafting up from the streets, and the urge to spit here 25 stories above
the city is almost unbearable.' Then he introduced the
piece de
resistance: 'the Love Goddess,' a bimbo decked out in a gold
lame evening gown,
squealing "Hello pigs," as she slipped into a 'Love
Harness much like
the one she has next to the bed at home.' then she
wrapped her legs
around a greased flagpole atop the building. Burly
riggers hoisted her
inch by inch up the pole, declaring her safe because,
said one of them,
'I always packed a safe rigging. I have a condemn on right now.' For
safety, the riggers, the host assures us, are all "wearing condoms." As the
Love Goddess slowly slithers up the pole she trilled,
'Oh, honey, this
feels good, baby. I'm glad you greased up this pole.
This makes me hot,
makes my hormones dance. This is more satisfying
than being
serviced by Big Foot. Oh, look, I see a woman breast- feeding her baby.
Oh no, that's Cher with her new boyfriend. I'm ready to go husband
hunting. I like my men hot, packed and unloading
everything," she
screamed. 'If you want to get off, I had multiples.'
Narrator: 'We can
see up your dress and that's pretty frightening too.'
Cut to promo for
another feature: A wild-eyed comic, after some talk about diarrhea,
describes what this show is, opening the stalls of
public restrooms,'
and surprising people." [CLURMAN, p. 323-324]
In 1995, Delores
Tucker of the National Political Congress of Black Women attended a
Time-Warner stockholders meeting to read to executives, face to face,
the misogynist lyrics of one of the company's bands (Nine Inch Nails). In
1997 a 14 year-old boy in Kentucky murdered three classmates "after a prayer
meeting." He told police that "he had seen it done before in a movie [The
Basketball Diaries] that featured a teenager dreaming about gunning down
students at a Catholic high school." The Associated Press called the
company (New Line Cinema, owned by Jewish mogul Ronald Perlman)
that made the movie, but Steve Elzer, vice president of publicity for the
firm, refused comment. [BRIDIS, 12-5-97]
In 1999, Dylan
Klebold (whose mother is Jewish) soared to notorious fame when he was
involved in the murder of 12 fellow students and a teacher at Columbine High
School in Colorado. There were mixed reports about his background, but he
participated in a Passover seder the month before the atrocity. "Some people
in the Jewish community," said a Jewish official at Klebold's mother's home
town, "have a sense of disquiet because of the news media playing up the
irony of somebody who has a Jewish heritage in their family being involved
in an incident of such tragic overtones on Hitler's birthday." [DICKTER, A.,
4-30-99, p. 18]
In the publishing
world, by 1977 this is the ethic that Michael Korda, a popular author of
Jewish heritage, and for thirty years the editor-in-chief at Simon
and Schuster, heralded as a growing trend for popular American culture
in his own book, Success!, reflecting both the worst of Old World
Talmudic ethics and the absolute stereotype of a Jewish Shylock:
"Before you read
any further, stop and tell yourself: * It's O.K. to be
greedy.
* It's O.K. to be
ambitious.
* It's O.K. to
look out for Number One.
* It's O.K. to
have a good time.
* It's O.K. to be
Machiavellian (if you can get away with it). * It's O.K. to
recognize that honesty is not always the best policy
(provided you
don't go around saying it).
* It's O.K. to be
a winner.
* It's always O.K. to be rich." [original author's emphasis;
KORDA,
p. 4]

(Korda is from a very wealthy mass media family. His uncle, Alexander
Korda, was "one of the most legendary and flamboyant of all film tycoons"
who "brought to stardom" Sir Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Marlene
Dietrich, and Vivien Leigh, among others. [KORDA, M., 1979, dustjacket]By 1998,
Studios USA (chairman: Greg Meidel), a division of the USA
Network (chairman: Barry Diller), both Jewish-directed and both
Jewish-owned by MCA and the Bronfman family, bowed to public
demands to morally civilize its Jerry Springer "talk show," a program that
regularly featured "chair-throwing brawls" and which was "a target for
politicians, religious groups, and television executives offended by its
fights, coarse language, and nudity." [BRAXTON, G, p. F2]
The Dallas Morning News described Springer (the son of
German-Jewish Jews who escaped the Holocaust) as "a bottom feeder whose
syndicated talk show epitomizes the worse television has to offer ... He
once apologized for writing checks to prostitutes while serving as the
married mayor [1977-81] of Cincinnati." [BARK, p. 41A] In 1998 Springer, the
"Sultan of Sleaze," reportedly paid $600,000 to ensure that a secret film of
him "romping with a 21-year-old porn star while her stepmother looked on"
wouldn't publicly surface. [COREY/WITHERIDGE, 11-2-98] (Bruce Dubrow, also
of Jewish heritage, the Springer show's Executive Producer, "created and
launched both the 'Sally Jessy Raphael Show' and 'The Jerry Springer Show."
[STARR, M., 1-4-99, p. 74] He later became Executive producer of the Joy
Browne show. Talk show host Rikki Lake is Jewish too. Sally Jessy Raphael's
father was also Jewish.) [JEWHOO, 2000]
A kindred spirit is
TV personality Geraldo Rivera (son of a Puerto Rican father and Jewish
mother). The Washington Post noted that Rivera was "the man who ...
spent much of the 80s and 90s getting rich off his trashy daytime talk show,
to which he lured teen satanists and mother-daughter prostitutes, while he
brawled with skinheads who broke his nose and had fat from his buttocks
implanted surgically in his forehead." [GROVE, p. C1]
Yet another Jewish
TV talk show host was blasted in the Washington Post. "The most
vulgar show I've seen," wrote Patricia Priest, "was a recent 'Maury Povich'
episode. The program featured an unbelievably crude discussion of women's
breasts." [PRIEST, p. C1] Executive Producer of the
Maury Povich show? Amy Rosenblum, a former producer at the Sally Jesse
Raphael Show. Earlier in his career, Povich did television news; moving from
Chicago to CBS in Los Angeles, Dick Goldberg was his news show 's producer.
Alfred Geller is Povich's agent. [POVICH, M. 1991, p. 131, 207] And Povich's
father, he notes, "was the respected, not to mention all-powerful, sports
editor and columnist for the Washington Post." [POVICH, M., 1991, p.
46]

Executive Producer of the Howie Mandel show? Diane Rappaport. And
further behind many of such shows is "one of television's foremost
specialists on syndication launches," Bonnie Kaplan, who has promoted a
variety of talk show formats, including the Geraldo Rivera, Jenny Jones,
Ophra Winfrey, and Joan Rivers shows, among others. [FEDER, p. 49]

A 2001 column by Michael Kelly in the Washington Post noted the
influence of Jeff Zucker upon popular culture:

"Mr. Zucker is the very role model for us. He is the president of NBC
Entertainment.
As such, he is responsible for 'Fear Factor,' NBC's 'reality show' in
which
people who are desperate enough for money are induced to risk bodily
harm
and endure national humiliation. Contestants on 'Fear Factor' have
allowed hundreds
of rats to swarm over their bodies and have been chased, in protective
clothing,
by attack dogs. Mr. Zucker mocks those who find something wrong with
this.
'We're having fun, we're having a great summer,' he told reporters this
week.
'Get a life.'" [KELLY, M., 7-25-01]

Yet neither the likes
of Singer or Rivera or Zucker can compare to the level of decadence reached
on a television talk show in Israel. In 1995 Haim Kreissel wrote with alarm
in the Jerusalem Post:
"On January 9, the TV
talk show Popoliticia featured a discussion on
snuff movies [films
that depict people actually tortured and killed for
later viewing
pleasure] ... The tragic result of all the publicity
will be an
increased demand for
such movies. Far worse, some Israelis may feel the
need to produce them
themselves ... Two well known Israeli philosophers, Adi
Tzemah and Yosef Agrassi, were invited to the
program ... To
summarize the philosophers' positions, morality and esthetics are two
disparate areas, and never the twain shall meet. While both philosophers
condemned those who made snuff movies, both saw
a possible esthetic
value in these movies. They appeared to be
recommending that we
judge them on aesthetic grounds, much as
people used to watch
gladiator shows. Woe to the society whose wise
men think along such
lines." [KREISSEL, p. 6]
**********************************
Two of America's
most influential newspapers, The New York Times and the Washington
Post (which, in turn, owns Newsweek), are
owned by families of Jewish heritage -- the Ochs/Sulzbergers and Grahams,
respectively. Chairwoman Martha Graham's father, Eugene Meyer, bought the
Post in 1933. At the Times, Sulzberger-related executives in
recent years have included Arthur Sulzberger, Steve and Michael Golden, and
Daniel Cohen. Other influential Jewish positions at the Times by the
early 1980s included the Executive Editor, Managing Editor, Associate
Editor, and Editorial Page Editor. (Another Jew, Fred Michael Hechinger, was
president of the New York Times Company Foundation).

As New York Times Executive Editor Max Frankel (who was with the
Times from the early '50s to 1994) confessed in his 1999
autobiography:

"Instead of idols and passions, I worshiped words and argument,
becoming
part of an unashamedly Jewish verbal invasion of American culture. It
was
especially satisfying to realize the wildest fantasy of the world's
anti-Semites: Inspired by our heritage as keepers of the book,
creators of law, and storytellers supreme, Jews in America did finally
achieve a disproportionate influence in universities and in all media
of communication. Punch Sulzberger [owner of
the New York Times] unconsciously abetted this movement. He
felt born to
the publisher's chair and had none of his father's hang-ups about
being Jewish. Israel's ambassadors to the United Nations lived just a
few floors below his
Fifth Avenue apartment and always enjoyed easy access to him and to
his table
at The Times. Within a few years of Punch's ascendancy, there came a
time
when not only the executive editor -- A. M. Rosenthal -- and I but
ALL the top editors listed on the paper's masthead were Jews. Over
vodka in the publisher's back room, this was occasionally mentioned an
any impolitic condition, but
it was altered only gradually, without any affirmative action on
behalf of
Christians." [author's emphasis: FRANKEL, M., 1999, p. 400-401]Joseph Goulden notes
the editorial bent at the influential New York paper: "Having reported from
Cairo, [Rick] Smith understood the Arabs' side of the endless Middle East
conflict; while not anti-Israel by any means, he came under constant
criticism from [Executive Editor A.M.] Rosenthal for supposedly 'slanting'
bureau stories towards the Arabs." [GOULDING, p. 303]
The Times
acquired the Boston Globe in the 1993; it also owns 21 other
newspapers throughout America, 10 magazines -- including Family Circle,
Golf Digest, and Tennis, and eight TV and two radio stations.
In 1999, the Boston Globe noted that "in a surprise move that ended
126 years of leadership of the Boston Globe by the Taylor family, the
New York Times yesterday replaced publisher Benjamin B. Taylor with
Richard H. Gilman, senior vice president of operations at the Times."
[JUROWITZ, p. A1] Gilman is also Jewish.
Arthur Ochs
Sulzberger and the Washington Post's Katherine Graham are also
"co-chairmen" of the International Herald Tribune, the best known
international English daily newspaper. The Time's
daily rival in Manhattan, the New York Post, has also been owned --
off and on over the years -- by Jewish entrepreneurs -- at one time owned by
heiress Dorothy Schiff -- granddaughter of famous investment banker Jacob
Schiff. (Peter Kalikow bought the Post in 1988). In 1976, Schiff's
biographer noted that "the owner, publisher and editor in chief of the [New
York Post] is Mrs. Dorothy Schiff, who has been called 'the most powerful
woman in New York,' an accolade she rejects." [POTTER, J., 1976, p. 9] Her
managing editor for the paper? Byron Greenberg. [POTTER, J., 1976, p. 16]
Earlier, "J. David Stern , whose papers included the Philadelphia Record,
bought the Post in the early 1930s and dropped the word 'Evening' from its
masthead." [POTTER, J., 1976, p. 161]

The New York Post during Schiff's tenure (1950s to 1970s) became
not only a mouthpiece for Zionism, but for the terrorist Irgun organization.
As Jeffrey Potter notes:

"'I don't think Dolly [owner Dorothy Schiff] was nearly as aware as I
was of the political direction of the paper," Paul [Sann, then
Executive
Editor of the New York Post] says."[Her husband] Thackery was very
close to the Irgunists and Menachem Begin. They were a must --
conferences, interviews -- but we were pushing their cause instead of
covering it. I was against those bastards -- I don't knock them now
they
got a stake -- but they were very, very suspect to me. I knew some of
them; they were creepy. They had an inordinate access to our columns.'

"Dorothy," continues Potter in his biography of her,

"it is clear, was not wholly unaware of the way her paper's columns
were being used: 'These terrorists [Schiff said] and other pressure
groups would come to [my non-Jewish husband] Ted in the office.
I think it was a psychological thing; he was jealous, he wanted his
own thing, and walked right into their hands. I didn't know they were
terrorists until I found out from one of our reporters, Fern Eckman,
but of course the Haganah [the early Israeli army] were more moderate.
Ted was apolitical originally, and in becoming far left, he may not
have understood he was in the hands of fellow travelers ... Henrietta
Szold, who was of German Jewish descent and started Hadassah
[the Zionist women's organization], was the first of the early Zionist
leaders I met. I was in my teens and told her that I wanted to
dedicate
myself to Palestine [today known as Israel]. She asked me what I could
do and I said I could sew. She didn't seem to think that would be
useful.'" [POTTER, J., 1976, p. 201-202]By 1979, one survey
identified 25-30% of the employees of the elite and influential media
organizations as Jews. (No further study has been done to chart this
trajectory in recent years, nor explore the details of their percentages in
the highestechelons of power. "When one looks at the
key decision-making positions," noted Jewish scholar Charles Silberman about
the 25-30% figure, "the Jewish role appears to be even larger." [SILBERMAN,
p. 153]). These "elite" media corporations of the most weighty influence in
the study included the New York Times, the Washington Post,
the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Time,
Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, and the ABC,
CBS, and NBC television networks, as well as
PBS (Public Broadcasting System).
Also by the 1980s, at
least three senior editors at the Washington Post were also Jewish,
as was the former editor of the Wall Street Journal and its
then-current Managing Editor. A Jew could also be found as the Editor of
Newsweek, the Managing Editor of Time, the Editor of the U.S.
News and World Report, as well as the Presidents of CBS and
ABC News Divisions, and company presidents of both PBS
and National Public Radio. [WHITFIELD,
American, p. 134-35, SILBERMAN, Certain, p. 153-154]
Maurice ("Reese") Schonfeld was also president at Ted Turner's
CNN,and a member of its Board of Directors, at
the company's emergence in 1980. In earlier years, Burt Reinhardt was a
Schonfeld partner in a venture with a UPI news service. "As his
ITNA service grew, Schonfeld became known in the business as the
Electronic News Godfather." Reinhardt later became executive vice-president
at CNN. Sam Zelman started out as vice-president and executive
producer. [WHITTEMORE, H., 1990, p. 12, 28, 57, 69] (CNN President
Schonfeld later became Chairman of International Network News
and head of the TV Food Network). By the 1990s, Bradley Siegel
was president of TNT (Turner Network Television).
As American-born
Israeli Ze'ev Chafets noted in 1985:
"Many of America's
leading editors are Jewish, including A. M. Rosenthal of the New York
Times, Howard Simons, managing editor of the Washington Post,
Henry Grunwald of Time, Marvin Stone of U.S. News and World Report,
William Shawn of the New Yorker, and Edward Kosner of New York
magazine. Recently Norman Pearlstine was appointed editor of the Wall
Street Journal." [CHAFETS, 1985, p. 277]
By 1987 the President
of Times-Mirror(Los Angeles Times) was Jewish (David
Laventhol, honored by the Anti-Defamation League in 1990), as was the editor
of Fortune magazine. [CHRISTOPHER, p. 151-152]
Richard Schlossberg III was also CEO of the Los Angeles Times in the
1990s. Although by 1998 the New York Post was owned by Rupert Murdoch
-- a non-Jewish media baron with close ties to Jewish organizations -- the
paper's president and publisher was Martin Singerman. (Murdoch's
Fox Broadcasting has also been headed by a steady series of Jewish
directors including Barry Diller, Joe Roth, and Peter Chernin. The CEO of
Murdoch's Fox Kids Worldwide? Haim Saban.
Murdoch's public relations agent? One Howard Rubenstein. (Rubenstein, noted
the New York Daily News, "is one of the city's most influential and
respected powerbrokers." [PIENCIAK, p. 20] Murdoch has also "contributed to
the favourite Jewish charity," noted London’s Daily Telegraph, "a
smart move in a Jewish-run industry." [ROBERTS, G., p.
1])
One of Murdoch's
former Jewish executives, Michael Clinger, at another media holding, "until
recently ... lived in the plush Swiss ski resort of St. Mortiz before
recently seeking refuge in Israel." There was, in fact,
an outstanding arrest warrant for Clinger and he was formally sought by
Interpol for "conspiracy, fraud, and insider dealing ... He remained a
fugitive from justice. The last attempt at extradition, through Interpol in
February [1996] remains unanswered by Israel." [FARRELLY, p. B3]
In 2000, yet another former executive of a Murdoch company found
himself in serious trouble. Once a former manager of the New York Post
and also a millionaire real estate developer, Abraham Hirschfeld was
convicted of hiring a hit man to murder former business partner Stanley
Stahl. [WONG, E., 6-17-2000, p. B2]

One of Mudoch's biographers (Thomas Kiernan) notes that

"Murdoch ... as publisher and editor-in-chief of the New York Post,
had a large Jewish constituency, as he did to a lesser degree with
New York magazine and The Village
Voice. Not only had the pre-Murdoch Post readership been
heavily Jewish, so too,
were the present Post advertisers. Moreover, most of Murdoch's
closest friends
business advisers were wealthy, influential New York Jews intensely
active in
pro-Israel causes ... There was no way, then, that Murdoch could allow
the Post
to relax its traditional advocacy of Israel as he turned it into New
York's main
organ of Reaganite orthodoxy. His first solution to the problem was to
expand
and banner the paper's stable of politically conservative columnists
who happened
to be Jewish. Norman Podhoretz and Dorothy Rabinowitz were just two of
the Post's right-wing voices ... His second solution, which was to
use the paper's
news pages to glorify Israel more intensively than ever while regularly
deriding
the actions of its Arab enemies, was not so subtle ... Much of the
Post's reportage
of events in the region was shamelessly slanted, distorted, and on more
than one
occasion, fabricated from the bare, dry, factual bones of wire service
copy."
[KIERNAN, T., 1986, p. 262]Another non-Jewish
mogul who spent some time in the Hollywood limelight was Kirk Kerkorian, of
Armenian heritage. He bought control of MGM in its dying years
in the 1970s, and later United Artists. And, like anyone who
expects to survive in the mass media world, he too surrounded himself with
Jewish partners, executives, agents, lawyers and others of the standard
movie-making and news world parade. His first choice to run the studio was
his "tennis-playing friend" Herb Jaffe, who turned his offer down. [BART, p.
32] Others at Kerkorian's MGM included president and CEO Frank
Rosenfelt; Frank Rothman (later CEO of MGM/UA); and Frank
Yablans (another head of MGM at a different time). When Gentile
Alan Ladd Jr. was picked to be share power as president and CEO with Yablans,
"the nucleus of his own team" was all Jewish: Jay Kanter, Richard Berger,
and John Goldwyn. [BART, p. 231] Other prominent
Kerkorian-era chiefs included Chief Financial Officer Sidney Sapowitz;
production heads David Begelman, Daniel Melnick, Freddie Fields and Paula
Weinstein; Herbert Solow; Peter Bart; lawyer Gregory Bautzer ("Kerkorian's
eyes and ears in the filmmaking community"); [BART, p. 17] Roger Birnbaum,
Ileen Maisel, and Lee Rich, among others. Kerkorian had earlier built his
fortune in Las Vegas, where he had many Jewish business associates,
including Jewish mobsters Meyer Lansky and Moe Dalitz. [BART, p. 47-51]
Kerkorian was also beholding to Jewish criminal financier Michael
Milken who helped sell MGM "junk bonds" to finance some Kerkorian
enterprises. [BART, p. 129-130]
Perhaps as summary to
all this, former MGM Jewish executive Peter Bart notes that
when Kerkorian eventually began negotiating over a year's time to sell
MGM off, the then-head of the company, Alan Ladd, "became a
sort of Wandering Jew of executives, which was ironic since he was he was
one of the few non-Jews to ever become a head of production." [BART, p. 255]
There was apparently a Jew in the shadows here though. "The strongest
influence on Laddie's [Ladd's] career was probably [his father's] second
wife, a former starlet and agent named Sue Carol." (She was also Jewish ;
her original name was Evelyn Lederer). [FABER, STEPHEN/GREEN, MARC; cited at
FIRM, 2001]
In the news world,
by the late 1980s, six of the top seven editorial positions at the New
York Times were held by Jews (their correspondent to Israel was also a
Jewish-American, Thomas Friedman), and three of the four most influential
positions at the Wall Street Journal. As noted
Joshua Halberstam in 1997, "The Wall Street Journal ... has been
under the editorial control of Jews for years (Warren Phillips was the CEO
of Dow-Jones, the company that owns the paper, and the paper's
former editor-in-chief is Norman Pearlstine, who is now the editor of
Time)." [HALBERSTAM, p. 19] (Warren Phillips was
succeeded as head of Dow-Jones by another Jewish executive,
Peter Kann. Dow-Jones also controls the economic journal,
Barron's).
A note here about
Pearlstine, former editor of the Wall Street Journal and now chief at
Time magazine, and the interconnectedness not only within the upper
echelons of the mass media, but crossing into the financial world of Wall
Street too. Pearlstine -- with a presumed responsibility to the credo of
"objective" journalism -- has been accused of being far too friendly with
some of Wall Street's most prominent (Jewish) financial predators. "As
Pearlstine began to settle into his new job [at the Wall Street Journal],"
notes Francis Dealy, a fellow executive at Dow-Jones, "he began
to relish the relationships formed with Wall Street celebrity deal makers
the likes of Ronald Perelman, who acquired Revlon in a hostile
takeover, Henry Kravits, of RJR-Nabisco fame, and Joe Flom ...
perhaps the biggest mergers-and-acquisitions attorney on Wall Street." [DEALY,
p. 239]
In March 1991
reporter Laurie Cohen submitted a formerly approved story at the Journal
to her superior, Dan Hertzberg, about the looming default of $400 million by
corporate raider Eli Jacobs. The story in its original form never made
print. "We can't run that," Hertzberg eventually told Cohen, "Jacobs is a
good friend of Norm's." [DEALY, p. 247] When the story did finally make the
Journal, it was rewritten and appeared in the back of the stock
section; the word "fraud" had been excised. [DEALY, p. 251]
Pearlstine admitted
in an interview that "I'm a friend of Ronnie's [Perelman] and Nancy
[Pearlstine's wife] is on his payroll. [Dow Jones executives]
Peter [Kann] and Warren [Phillips] know all that ... Yes, I've been to seder
[a Jewish religious gathering] at Ronnie's, and so have a lot of other
people like Joe Flom, Eli [Jacobs], and others ... Ronnie and I come from
the same suburban Philadelphia background ... Besides, I like to know the
people I write about..." [DEALY, p. 307] In the wake of
the many criminal accusations against Michael Milken, when the junk-bond
king decided upon a massive public relations campaign to counter his
negative image, he hired Norman Pearlstine's old girlfriend, Linda Robinson,
to lead the task. [DEALY, p. 308]
(In 1999, Time
magazine designed a publicity stunt, soliciting votes by Internet from
people around the world for a "Person of the Century" for their year 2000
issue. Initial balloting placed Jesus Christ in the lead, but he was ruled
by Time management to be ineligible because he wasn't born
in the past century. With Christ's rejection, by existing vote tally, that
left Adolf Hitler as the tentative new #1. This choice is also offensive to
Jewish sensibilities. Whether "Person of the Century" has anything to do
with "good" or not, this prospect of Hitler in the lead didn't sit well with
Jewish groups so, not surprisingly, they banded together in a crusade to
stuff votes for their own man, assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak
Rabin, who soon led the "Person of the Century" pack.) [KURTZ, p. A12])
There is often an
incestuous nature between members of the mass media and its newsworthy
subjects. Jewish newscaster Ted Koppel and former Jewish Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger "are old friends." [HERTSGAARD, 1991, p. 53] In 1982, a
60 Minutes producer, Bill Willson, tried to get reporter Mike Wallace to
do an expose on Katherine Graham, head of the Washington Post. "I
don't think I want to do that story," Wallace told Willson, "Kay Graham is a
friend of mine, and I play tennis with her in the summers of Martha's
Vineyard. Why don't you get someone else to do it?" [HERTSGAARD, M., 1991,
p. 53] For what it's worth, both Wallace and Graham are of Jewish heritage,
as is 60 Minutes Executive Producer Don Hewitt who finally vetoed the
Graham story. For Hewitt's part, his "two closest friends on the West Coast
were Lew and Edie Wasserman." (To Hewitt's credit, a program entitled
"Hollywood and the Mob," that included Wasserman, destroyed that
friendship). [HERTSGAARD, M., p. 53]
In a 1991 story
about the newsroom at 60 Minutes, reporter Mark Hertsgaard singled
out Hewitt and Wallace as chronic sexist offenders, for years sexually
harassing their female employees:
"Mike Wallace's abuse
of underlings is legendary. Again and again, colleagues chose the
word bully to describe his lacerating treatment of subordinates ...
Wallace is accused of repeatedly making lewd comments about
women's physiques and bedroom abilities, pinching their bottoms and
both snapping and unhooking their bra straps."
For Hewitt's part,
former 60 Minutes reporter Sally Quinn wrote that "Everybody knows
that Hewitt makes passes at women with aspirations. But nobody talks about
it. If you're smart, you'll keep your mouth shut." Another female employee
told Hertsgaard about Hewitt's physical attack upon her:
"Before she knew it,
he grabbed her and started to kiss her. With
great strength, he
grasped both her forearms right below her elbows
and 'rammed me up
against the wall ... I was shaking. I remember
he had stuck tongue
down my throat' ... The women who say they
experienced the
harassment emphasize that they refrained from protest
for fear that, in a
community as small as network TV, making public
accusations against
men as powerful as Wallace and Hewitt would
mean they would never
get hired or promoted again." [HERTSGAARD,
M., 1991, p. 82]
Reporter Hertsgaard
later had the opportunity to expand about workroom conditions at 60
Minutes in a feminist Internet journal, Mothers Who Think. His
original article had appeared in Rolling Stone magazine (whose editor
is also Jewish, Jann Wenner). As Hertsgaard later noted:
"The entire piece
almost never ran because Don Hewitt tried to kill it and (Rolling
Stone editor and publisher) Jann Wenner almost went along with him. They
did emasculate the piece by taking out a lot of the damaging
material. You'll see in there that there is one basic episode involving
Don. There were four that I had reported ... Don tried to kill it by
talking to Jann Wenner privately, asking, 'What is
this story you've got
on me?" [LLOYD, C., ONLINE]
******************************
"Of the three leading
papers," wrote Charles Silberman in 1985, "only the Washington Post
has a non-Jew ... as an editorial chief; but there is no shortage of Jews in
top ranks of the Post." [SILBERMAN, p. 153] (Washington Post
Jewish newcomers in top editorial posts for the 1990s included Meg
Greenfield and Stephen Rosenfeld). Jews had become "equally influential" in
the management of TV news and many Jewish network correspondents were
"household names," including CBS's Mike Wallace [Myron Wallach],
whose son, Chris Wallace, became the White House correspondent for
NBC News), Morley Safar, Bernard Goldberg, Daniel Schorr [Early in his
career in 1955, "Schorr arrived in Moscow soon after NBC had
placed its own [Jewish] correspondent, Irving R. Levine, there."] [SLATER,
R., 1988, p. 181], Leslie Stahl, and Morton Dean of CBS; Marvin
Kalb (whose broadcasting brother Bernard eventually became President Ronald
Reagan's press secretary; Marvin is currently the executive director of
Harvard's Shorenstein Media Center) and Irving R. Levine of
NBC; and Herbert Kaplow, Barbara Walters, and Ted Koppel of
ABC (Koppels' daughter, Andrea, is CNN's State
Department correspondent).
Matt Lauer is co-host
of the Today Show on NBC. Famed Internet independent
journalist Matt Drudge is also Jewish. [JEWHOO, 2000] Giselle Fernandez,
anchor of NBC's Sunday night news, has a Jewish mother. Bill
Maher, of Politically Incorrect? "His father was Irish Catholic, but
he identifies more with his mother's Jewish heritage. ('My mother and I
really get along because she's like me. It's hard to explain, but my father
and my sister acted more Irish. You just have to know what that means.')" [RUSOFF,
J., 2001] Charlie Rose has his own program on PBS. He also
co-hosts 60 Minutes II. He is a former Executive Producer of the
Bill Moyers Journal and anchorman at CBS News programs
Face the Nation, CBS Morning News, and other programs. Other
prominent Jewish newscasters have included Jeff Greenfield and Martin
Agronsky. Agronsky's career spanned all three commercial networks and
PBS. "When Agronsky retired in 1987, 'Agronsky and Company' was
still television's highest rated political talk show ... Agronsky's interest
in Israel sustained itself throughout his life; even in his retirement,
Agronsky gave many lectures on Middle East affairs, donating his fees to the
United Jewish Appeal." [WALLACE-WELLS, B., 1999, p. 6] (Prominent Jewish
executives at PBS for the late 1990s have included the Director
of Corporate Communications, Stu Kantor. And, earlier, Jewish mogul Walter
Annenberg's philanthropy of $150 million to public TV we may safely presume
to have been influential in policy: "He that pays the piper calls the tune."
Director of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for
Communications and its Norman Lear Center? Also Jewish, like the two
philanthropists, is Marty Kaplan).
Joan Lunden was a
regular on ABC's Good Morning America. Famous (Jewish)
news anchorwoman Jessica Savitch died in a 1983 car accident with Martin
Fischbein, a vice president at the New York Post. Wolf Blitzer is
CNN's White House correspondent; he formerly edited a journal
published by the formal Israeli lobbying arm in Washington, AIPAC, moving
then to the Jewish Chronicle and Jerusalem Post. Likewise,
Charles Fenyvesi practiced his journalism skills at AIPAC's Near
East Report before moving on to the Washington Post. [KENEN, I.,
p. 112] Reporter Bob Simon of the 60 Minutes II show has a residence
in Israel. [WALZ, 1-5-98] John Donovan, ABC Nightline correspondent
and occasional anchor, is married to Israeli Ranit Mishori.
"Objective" news?
Take the case of behind-the-scenes world of famous Jewish
newswoman/interviewer Barbara Walters. Her father Louis was a "nightclub
entrepreneur and original owner of the Latin Quarter") [BLACKWELL, E., 1973,
p. 509] Carli Laklan (in a book written for adolescents about famously
successful career women) notes that the Walters family once lived "on an
offshore island in what was practically a castle and staffed with servants.
[Barbara's father] showered the family with luxuries. After the years of
near poverty it was all quite overwhelming. Barbara was enrolled in a
private school. Every day the chauffeur drove her to the club where she
kissed her parents good morning." [LAKLIN, C., 1983, p. 155] Walters'
husband also merits some attention here, particularly the influence of her
husband, Merv Adelson. He has headed Hollywood powerhouse
Lorimar-Pictures Telepictures Corporation, which has a long line of
television hits (Eight is Enough, Dallas, The Waltons,
Knott's Landing, Falcon Crest, among others). More
intriguingly, notes Dan Moldea, Adelson was a "longtime business associate
and friend of [Jewish mobster] Moe Dalitz and other underworld figures." [MOLDEA,
1989, p. 413] He was also once co-owner with Dalitz and others of the La
Costa Country Club in Carlsbad, California, described by some as "the
playground for the mob." [MOLDEA, 1989, p. 413] An activist in Israeli and
other Jewish causes (he co-chaired, for example, Israel's fiftieth
anniversary celebration aired on CBS), Adelson also has long
been involved in Las Vegas circles as well, including co-ownership with
Irwin Molasky in the Colonial House casino.
News anchor Peter
Jennings had a Jewish wife, Kati Marton (Chairwoman of the Committee to
Protect Journalists), and CBS anchorwoman Connie Chung's
husband (talk-show host Maury Povich) is also Jewish. Newswoman Diane
Sawyer's husband is Jewish film director Mike Nichols. NBC's chief foreign
affairs correspondent, Andrea Mitchell, also Jewish, is married to Alan
Greenspan, one of the most powerful men in the country; he's the (Jewish)
Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. When (Catholic-raised) Cokie Roberts
(today a prominent ABC news commentator) married Steve Roberts,
(today a CNN/Late Edition panelist) it was "an enormous
problem" for his Jewish family who preferred a Jewish spouse for him. [MCELWAINE,
1/2-98] CNN foreign news correspondent
Christianne Amanpour is married to State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin.
Earlier pioneer
Jewish television personalities have included the influential likes of David
Susskind, Laurence Spivak (host of seminal news show Meet the Press),
Irving Kupcinet, Stuart Schulberg, Edwin Newman, and many others.
"The greatest
concentration of Jews, however," says Charles Silberman,
"is at the producer
level -- and it is the producers who decide which stories will go on
the air, and how long, and in what order, they will run.
In 1982, before a
shift in assignments, the executive producers of all three evening
newscasts were Jewish, as were the executive producers
of CBS's
60 Minutes and ABC's 20/20. And Jews are almost
equally
prominent at the
'senior producer' and 'broadcast producer' levels as
well as in senior
management. When Reuven Frank stepped down as President of
NBC News in 1984, for example, he was replaced by
Laurence Grossman,
who left the Presidency of PBS to take the
position." [SILBERMAN,
p. 154]
Frank's term noted
above as head of NBC News was his second: his first term at the
helm was from 1968-73. The Jewish string of news chiefs at rival
CBS was also long -- Jews headed the news division for the first thirty
years of the company. Sig Mickelson was the president of
CBS News from the position's inception, from 1949 to 1961.
Richard Salant then followed from 1961-1964. Then came Fred Friendly, (born
Ferdinand Wachenheimer), also Jewish. [SCHOENBURN, p. 58] (Friendly "never
graduated from college but ended up a professor at Columbia University.") [JARVICK,
1997, p. xvi] Salant returned to the CBS News presidential
position in 1966, serving to 1979. [HAMMMOND, p. 36, 100] In a book about
television documentaries from 1965-1975, at least 11 -- possibly 13 -- of 21
prominent network producers/directors highlighted in photographs are Jewish:
NBC's Fred Freed, Reuven Frank, CBS's Don Hewitt,
Richard Salant, John Sarnik, Irv Drasnin, Perry Wolff, Morley Safar, Stephen
Fleischman; ABC's Avram Westin; and Martin Carr who worked at
various times for all three major networks). [HAMMOND, 1981]
Israeli Ze'ev
Chafets notes that:
"In his famous study
of television news in 1973, Daniel Jay Epstein
interviewed
thirty-six network news producers and editors -- twenty-one
of whom turned out
to be Jews." [CHAFETS, 1985, p. 277]
(As Epstein stated
it, "A majority [of the 36] came from middle or upper class families, in
which a father usually was a businessman. Twenty-one were of Jewish descent;
none were black or came from lower-class backgrounds." [EPSTEIN, EJ, 1973,
p. 223])
Likewise, when the
head of the entire company of ABC, Leonard Goldenson stepped
down in the 1980s, Fred Silverman took his place. In the
same era, as further example, at one point both CBS Morning News'
"managers of news planning," Jon Katz and Steve Isaacs, were both
Jewish. And who negotiated their salaries? A Jewish talent agent, Richard
Liebner, who represented over 100 CBS News employees from
anchor stars to field producers. [BOYER, p. 45, 217]
In 1989, a media
watch group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), meticulously
examined 865 of ABC News' influential Nightline
programs, finding that "working, middle-class and poor people and their
representatives are provided no opportunity to speak out." 89% of the U.S.
guests on the program were found to be men, and 92% white. (No mention was
made of what percentage of those "white" guests were Jewish, although of the
top four people to have most repeatedly visited Nightline, two
government officials -- Henry Kissinger and Elliott Abrams -- were Jewish).
And not only was Ted Koppel, the on-air host of Nightline, and
its Executive Producer, Daniel Kaplan, Jewish, but so was the director of
FAIR, the investigating organization: Jeff Cohen. [LEE/SOLOMON, 1990, p.
26-30]
In 1987, Steve
Friedman, "the man often credited with making the 'Today' show No. 1
in the morning ratings" left the program. [BELKIN, L.
6-6-87] He was both Jewish and the show's Executive Producer. In the 1990s,
Jewish television producer dominance has endured. In
1999, Friedman became the Executive Producer of This Morning at CBS.
Don Hewitt continued to be the Executive Producer of CBS's
60 Minutes (its core team of [Jewish] reporters has long been Morley
Safar, Leslie Stahl, and Mike Wallace; its "chief investigative producer"
was Lowell Bergman), [HOROWITZ, D., 1999, p. 192] In the 1990s, Victor
Neufeld held the Executive Producer position at ABC's 20-20,
Jeff Zucker was the new Executive Producer at NBC's Today
show, Jeff Gralnick headed the NBCNightly News, Neal
Shapiro was top man at NBC's Dateline and Bob Reichbloom
was in charge at Good Morning America. (By 2000, this show's
Executive Producer was Shelley Ross). Susan Zirinsky has been the executive
producer of CBS's 48 Hours since 1996. The president of NBC
News was Andrew Lack (replaced by Neal Shapiro in 2001), the president
of CBS News was Eric Ober, and the president of ABC
News was David Westin. The head of the CNN news division is Rick
Kaplan.
And a common Jewish
perspective of their roles throughout the field of American journalism? This
from a Jewish scholar, Charles Silberman:
"As Richard Cohen,
columnist for the Washington Post puts it, 'Jews are
foreign
correspondents in their own country.'" [SILBERMAN, p. 154]
Ze'ev Chafets was
born and raised in Pontiac, Michigan, but emigrated to Israel and became an
official at the government mass media office there. "During my years at the
Press Office," he notes,
"I made it a rule not
to raise the question of the religious or ethnic
identity of visiting
journalists [from other countries] but often Jewish
correspondents did so
themselves. Sometimes it was done in a
transparent attempt
to get trust and cooperation, sometimes in an
off-hand way in which
an American reporter of Italian ancestry might
mention his
grandparents' origins to a government official in Rome;
but usually it
signaled that the journalist felt personally connected to
the country." [CHAFETS,
p.282]
"Journalists such as
Anthony Lewis and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times [Friedman
worked as a summer intern for the CIA in 1975 after college graduation] [TWERSKY,
p. 80], and Mike Wallace of CBS,” says J. J. Goldberg, "make little secret
of the fact that they feel an attachment to Israel, and that this attachment
might make them focus more closely on Israel, warts and all ...
[GOLDBERG, JJ, p. 282] ... Columnists most often
figured as defenders of Israel and Jewish interests [include]: William
Safire and A.M. Rosenthal of the New York Times, Richard Cohen of the
Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post,
Frank Rich of the New York Times, and New Republic editor
Martin Peretz and literary editor, Leon Wieseltier." [GOLDBERG, JJ,] As
longtime 60 Minutes reporter Mike Wallace once wrote, "In a variety
of private ways, I had contributed my efforts to raising money and support
for Israeli causes." [WALLACE/GATES, 1984, p. 298-299]
As Ze'ev Chafets
noted in 1985:
"There are a large
number of Jews among America's most
prominent
syndicated columnists, including Anthony Lewis,
Flora Lewis, and
William Safire of the New York Times; Meg
Greenfield, Steven
Rosenfeld, and Richard Cohen of the Washington
Post; Joseph
Kraft, Ben Wattenberg, and Roger Simon. The list
of [Jewish]
journalists who have covered the Middle East in recent
years includes Ned
Temko of the Christian Science Monitor,
Thomas Friedman of
the New York Times, Abdullah (Mark)
Schleifer of
NBC, Robert Simon and Bruno Wassertheil of CBS,
Jay Bushinsky and
Jane Friedman of CNN, Brooke Kroeger and Mel
Laytner of
UPI, Marcus Eliason and Art Max of AP, Jonathan Broder
of the Chicago
Tribune, and Charlie Weiss and Ron Pernstein of Voice
of America."
[CHAFETS, 1985, p. 277]

How does one get to such prominence? Perhaps Anthony Lewis is an
example. His father was a co-partner in Crown Fabrics, one of New York's
"leading firms in the garment center." As Roy Cohn notes:

"[Jewish Supreme Court Justice] Felix Frankfurter got Arthur Hays
Sulzberger
[also Jewish], publisher of The New York Times, to hire Tony
from the Washington News and assign him to cover the Supreme Court."
[ZION, S., 1988,
p. 31] Moving along in the
media ownership world, the Village Voice, New York's
"alternative voice" to the mainstream media, was bought by Leonard Stern in
1985 (editor: Richard Goldstein; publisher: David Schneiderman). Stern's
Hartz Mountain Pet Company settled two anti-trust suits in 1979 for $100
million and he "was forced to pay $640,000 in back pay to workers as part of
a settlement of a 1974 union-organizing fight." [BRENNER, p. 347]
Mr. Stern personally pledged $5 million to the United Jewish Appeal
in 1974, part of a campaign that year that "unabashedly raised money in
staggering amounts to send to Israel." [ISAACS, p. 266]
The Voice's
weekly counterpart in Los Angeles, the LA Weekly, is also
Jewish-owned and edited. Its creator and first editor was Jay Levin. He and
three others, including Joie Davidow, were co-founders of the paper; Davidow
later founded LA Style and "the Latino-culture magazine - Si."
Stuart Goldman was the first music editor and Susan Mogul the photography
editor, later replaced by Howard Rosenberg. Michael Sigman was the general
manager, later publisher. A later Executive Editor was
Harold Meyerson. In 1995, the aforementioned Leonard Stern's Stern
Publishing company bought the LA Weekly. [BURK, G., 11-28-98, p.
10] Stern eventually sold his newspaper holdings in 2000 to the president
and publisher of the Village Voice, David Schneiderman, who headed an
investment group. This new conglomerate, Village Voice Media
(CEO: Schneiderman; president: Arthur Howe), now had collected a growing
stable of "alternative" newspapers across the country including the
Village Voice and LA Weekly, the Nashville Scene, the
Cleveland Free Times, City Pages (Minneapolis-St. Paul), Ace
Magazine (Lexington, Kentucky), and the Long Island Voice. [LOS
ANGELES TIMES, 1-6-2000, p. C4; BERGER, K., 1-13-2000]

In Chicago, Jane Levine is the publisher of the Chicago Reader,
yet another ideologically "alternative" paper. Levine's investors' "also own
Washington City Paper and half of the East Bay Express in
Berkeley, California). [COLFORD, P., 6-11-98, p. E4] Stephen Mindich, also
Jewish, owns the Phoenix Media communications Group which includes the
"alternative" weeklies the Boston Phoenix (the largest weekly
newspaper in New England), the Worcester [Mass.] Phoenix, the
Providence [Rhode Island] Phoenix, and another in Portland,
Maine. He also owns Boston radio station WFNX and Phoenix Ventures
(publishers of the offical yearbook for local professional sports teams,
etc.). [yahoodi.com and Phoenix Media Communications Group web site] Even in
Santa Fe, New Mexico, the free weekly Santa Fe Reporter is edited by
Julia Goldberg.

Another alternative weekly newspaper chain, in several cities, is New
Times. The executive editor for them all is Michael Lacey (2001). Its
Dallas paper, the Dallas Observer, is edited by Julie Lyons. (2001)
Diane Straus Tucker (whose father Peter Straus married Monica Lewinsky's mom
recently) became publisher of Manhattan Media's weeklies Our Town,
West Side Spirit, the Westsider, and the Chelsea Clinton
News.
Rolling Stone,
the influential music industry journal, was founded, and has since been
controlled and edited, by Jann Wenner. He is also Jewish. By 1989 Rolling
Stone was worth $250 million. Once considered the "voice of the
counterculture," Associate Publisher Les Zeifman referred to it as "the Wall
Street Journal of rock and roll." [DRAPER, p. 15] In 1986 an advertising
newsletter called Marketing Through Magazines was instituted by
Rolling Stone to forge tobacco, beer, and other corporate sponsors of
musical acts and the appropriation of famous songs for commercials. The
driving force behind the "counter-culture" Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner,
eventually developed an "ostentatious lifestyle of private jets, country
villas, and choice social connections." [DRAPER, p. 21] Robert Draper notes
that in the early years of the paper Wenner
"cut a multitude of
ethical corners: stealing initial subscription lists from
another magazine,
awarding himself shares of company stock so as to
secure minority
control, lying to advertisers about Rolling Stone's readership, and
pocketing the magazines subscription dues while the rest
of the staff worked
for little or nothing ... From the outset, Wenner
proved his finest
talent to be exploiting the talents of others."
[DRAPER, p. 9]
Wenner also became
chief editor of Look magazine in 1979, not long before it folded, and
attained a controlling interest in US magazine. Another Wenner-initiated
periodical was Men's World in 1992. When Rolling Stone moved
to New York in 1977, the paper's new focus seemed to be that "famous New
York writers ... wrote about famous New Yorkers." [DRAPER, p. 15] (From
England, Maurice Kinn, also Jewish, who died in 2000, "published the New
Musical Express, one of the world's foremost music newspapers.") [KIRSCHNER,
S., 9-14-2000]
The New Yorker,
the American Mercury, and Esquire were also founded by Jews.
(The current editor of the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, Gene
Lichtenstein, is the former fiction editor at Esquire). Ms
magazine was largely founded by Jewish feminists. Its most famous personage
is Gloria Steinhem, born of partial Jewish background, who has asserted a
Jewish identity. She was also the co-founder of New York magazine.
The original managing editor of Ms. was Suzanne Levine. An early
prominent financial supporter was the Washington Post's Katherine
Graham. By 1977 Warner Communications owned a quarter of Ms.
and the media giant's Jewish director of its publishing division, William
Sarnoff, was the only male on the Ms. board of directors. (Even Al
Feldstein's zany Mad magazine was part of the Warner
stable. Feldstein of course is also Jewish).
Joseph Pulitzer (of
"Pulitzer Prize" fame) was a Jewish immigrant from Hungary; he bought the
St. Louis Post Dispatch in 1878. In 1887 he launched the New York
World, one of the pioneers of what’s known today as "yellow journalism,"
focusing on crime, disasters, and other kinds of sensationalism.
In 1996 the Pulitzer family purchased control of 16 daily and 30
non-daily publications. They also have two radio stations, nine TV stations,
and are part owner of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. By 1989, the
Pulitzer Prize Board of Directors included 6 Jews, 7 WASPs, 2 Blacks, and a
Polish-American. [CHRISTOPHER, p. 151] The (Jewish)
administrator of the Pulitzer prizes from 1953 to 1975 was Paul Hohenberg. [KIRSCHNER,
S., 9-14-00, p. 11] Elsewhere, based in St. Louis, Barry Baker (originally
Barry Bakelman) is the CEO of River City Broadcasting with
television stations in St. Louis, San Antonio, Indianapolis, and Des Moines.
From San Francisco,
the Hellman and Freedman investment company (18 offices in the
United States, England, China, and Brazil) owns Advanstar
Communications (chairman and CEO: Robert Krakoff; Vice Chairman: Ira
Siegel) among other holdings. Advanstar publishes over 100
"specialty magazines" (the likes of Video Store News, Managed
Healthcare, Physician's Management, Travel Agent, et al)
and produces 100 trade shows and exhibitions a year, including "the largest
apparel trade shows in the nation and abroad." [ABRAMS, S. p. 12]
Ian Levine and Herman
Bruggnik are co-chairmen of Reed Elsevier PLC. This company
"publishes more than 1,200 scientific journals, as well as business,
consumer, and professional magazines primarily in the US and Europe,
including Variety and Publishers' Weekly. (Variety was
founded in 1905 by Sime Silverman). Reed Elsevier also owns
Lexis Nexis, "the world's largest provider of full-text
information." [HOOVER, p. 148] A division of
Reed Elsevier is Cahners, founded in 1946 by Saul Goldweitz
and Norman Cahners. Norman Goldweitz was the company's CEO until he retired
in 1989. "During his 40-year career," notes the Boston Herald, ""Mr.
Goldweitz succeeded in expanding a single-publication business into one of
the largest business-to-business publishing and trade exposition companies
in the world." [BOSTON HERALD, p. 69]
(In 1995,
Elsevier, publisher of the scholarly journal Human Behavior and
Evolution Society, sought to censor the comments of contributor John
Hartung, who frankly addressed Jewish religious racism in a book review.
Hartung was accused by some Jews of anti-Semitism, and Elsevier
refused to publish in the journal Hartung's response to this accusation. The
editor of the periodical, Michael McGuire, a neuroscientist at the
University of California, notes that "[Elsevier] wouldn't let
me talk to the decision-maker." "Elsevier," added Science
magazine reporter Constance Holden, "kept shifting ground, at different
times offering different rationales for the action, says McGuire ...
Elsevier staff did not respond to phone calls from Science.")
[HOLDEN, C., 7-96, p. 177]
As Hartung wrote in
his censored piece: "As to the charge of anti-Semitism that has been leveled
against me, if anti-Semitism is defined as prejudice against people who are
Jewish, I am not anti-Semitic by any stretch of the imagination. One can
have respect for people of a religious persuasion while questioning the
persuasions of their religion. However, if one's definition of anti-Semitism
applies to those who make critical inquiry into the fundamental tenets of
Judaism, I could be labeled anti-Semitic." [HARTUNG, 1995?, Online]
Another Jewish
entrepreneur, Moses Koenigsberg, founded the omnipresent King
Features Syndicate. Michael and Roger King founded
King World Productions, "one of the most powerful firms in television
syndication ... Today the company boasts annual revenues of $584 million
through hits such as 'Jeopardy,' 'Wheel of Fortune,' 'Inside Edition,'
'Hollywood Squares,' and 'The Ophrah Winfrey Show.' Although CBS
bought the company for $2.5 billion in 1999, the Kings still run it. [MOTHER
JONES, 5-3-01] In another large media chain, Daniel Gold became the
president/CEO of the TV station group of the Knight-Ridder
Broadcasting Company. He had formerly been the CEO/president of
Comcast Cable Corporation and eventually became the CEO of
ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, which
licenses musical compositions to the tune of nearly $400 million per year).
[ELKINS, D., p. 10X] (1996 CEO of ASCAP? Marilyn Bergman).
In the midwest, Jeff
Smulyan's mini-media empire -- Emmis Broadcasting -- today
employs 1,000 people Emmis owns eight radio stations and many city/state
magazines -- Indianapolis Monthly, Los Angeles Magazine,
Texas Monthly, Cincinnati Monthly, and Atlanta.
In Greenwich, Connecticut, Marty Edelston's Boardroom Inc. is
a yearly $100 million business, publishing newsletters and books. From
Michigan, David Hermelin (noted as one of Detroit's top 400 "movers and
shakers") is a partner since 1986 in WMCA-AM in New York, "one
of that city's top talk show stations ... His wife, Doreen, is heavily into
Jewish causes." [KISKA, T., p. 99] In Miami, Ed Ansin's Sunbeam
Television owns TV station WSUN, "one of the largest
independent owned Fox stations in the country." Ansin, a "strong supporter
of the Anti-Defamation League," added Boston's WHDH TV station
to his stable in 1992. [KIMMEL, D., 2-17-2000, p. 15] From San Diego, the
Dan Devlin Design group, "known throughout the television industry for
state-of-the-art news sets," in the late 1990s joined forces with the
Israeli company Orad to build computer-generated "virtual
reality" environments for newscasters. [GREEN, F., 11-14-97] Philip Levine,
one of the major individual philanthropists to the Democratic Party, heads
Onboard Media which provides "customized media programs for luxury cruise
lines, leading hotels, and other businesses." [MOTHER JONES, 5-3-01]
Elsewhere,
"info-mogul" Michael Bloomberg (elected in 2001 as the Mayor of New York
City) heads a computer-database-media company worth $2 billion. The
Baltimore Jewish Times notes that
"Today millions of
people hear and see the Bloomberg name through a
multi-tentacled news
organization that includes a 56-bureau international
wire service; a
nationwide syndicate of radio stations; commercial and
public television
station; a glossy monthly magazine; and a personal finance journal
inserted into 21 major newspapers that reach 7 million homes each week. If
you visit New York, you'll be hard-pressed to miss Mr. Bloomberg's
billboards." [CONN, p. 48]
Bloomberg
Business News also employs 350 reporters in 61 bureaus throughout the
globe. Bloomberg Information Radio appears on 57 American stations.
It's business and news reports also air on 500 National Public Radio
stations, as well as on Voice of America and Armed Services Radio. [CONN, p.
48] In 1999, Bloomberg and his sister gave $1 million to
a scholarship fund sponsored by Hadassah, the international women's Zionist
organization, in honor of their mother who had been a lifelong member of
that organiation. [KAHN, E., 3-23-01]

Another business news network, Business Wire, is owned by San
Francisco-based Lorry Lokey, also Jewish. Business Wire claims to be
"the leading source of news on major U.S. corporations," and was the first
to use PhotoWire, an Internet transmission of news photographs. [BUSINESS
WIRE, 11-9-99] Elsewhere, in 1995,
Steve Greenberg and Brian Bedol founded the Classic Sports Network,
a cable TV enterprise. [See earlier chapter addressing Jews in sports
journalism]. Earlier, Mitchell Rubinstein and Laurie Silvers founded the
Sci Fi Channel, as well as Big Entertainment, Inc.
Another of their media ventures, Big Entertainment, signed a
deal with former basketball star Magic Johnson in 1997 for "Magic Johnson
books and textbooks." The company's Tekno Books division is
headed by Martin Greenberg.
Advance
Publications, little recognized by the general public, was by the
mid-1980s "one of the largest, most prosperous, most intensely private
companies in America" and ranked as the fifth largest media company in the
country, only behind ABC, CBS, Time Inc.,
and RCA. It was founded by a Eastern European Jewish immigrant,
S. I. Newhouse, "a merciless union buster," and is currently owned by his
descendants. The Newhouse patriarch "was one the most nepotistic of American
employers; at one point, some 64 Newhouse sons, brothers, cousins, and
in-laws were on the Newhouse payroll." [BIRMINGHAM, p. xi] By 1996 the
Newhouse family was worth about 9 billion dollars. Advance,
through its subsidiary, Conde Nast Publications, by 1988 owned,
among other holdings, the New Yorker, House and Garden (HG),
Mademoiselle (the Jewish publisher of this magazine, Julie
Lewit-Nirenberg, also founded Savvy, New York Woman, and
Mirabella), Glamour, Bride's, Vanity Fair,
Gentlemen's Quarterly (GQ), Self,Conde Nast Traveler,
Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Allure, Architectural Digest,
Wired, and Details. Vogue magazine was bought by
Newhouse as a gift for his wife, Mitzi. Versions of some
of these magazines appear in French, Italian, Australian, German, British,
Mexican and Brazilian editions. In England Conde Nast also owns
Tatler and World of Interiors. Advance also owns a Sunday
newspaper supplement, Parade, which by the 1980s was appearing in 314
newspapers with an audience of 64.8 million people. (A former editor of
Parade, Lloyd Shearer, was a strident activist in the Anti-Defamation
League and the notorious Jewish Defense League.) [LILENTHAL, p. 220]
Advance
also owns twenty-nine newspapers, including Newsday (originally
founded by Harry Guggenheim), the Newark Star Ledger, the
Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. It
also owns a stable of major New York publishing houses, including
Random House, Alfred A. Knopf, Pantheon, (New
York) Times Books, Ballantine, Fawcett,
Schocken, Bonanza, and Villard. In
1988 the fifth largest publishing conglomerate, Crown Publishing
Group, was absorbed by Random House. [Random House
was sold for $1.2 billion in 1998. Why? To open up possibilities, said Si
Newhouse, for more "acquisitions, certainly." [KELLY, p. 68] Other
possessions have included television and radio stations and the country's
largest cable TV system. [MAHON, p. 231] It also controls the
Discovery Channel which reaches 63 million homes and another 80 million
in 65 countries across the world, as well as Lifetime and
The Learning Channel. [MOMENT, p. 36]
Newhouse cousin,
Robert Miron, became chairman of the National Cable Television
Association in 1990. [MAIER, p. 353] And in April 1999 the president of
Advance, Donald Newhouse, was "reelected Chairman of the Board
of Directors of the Associated Press." [INTL HERALD TRIB,
4-28-99, p. 3] In 1994 the S.I. Newhouse Foundation donated nearly one
million dollars to the United Jewish Appeal, and other large sums to a
synagogue in New York City and the Anti-Defamation League. [MOMENT, p. 36]
In 1996 the Anti-Defamation League created the "Norman H. Newhouse Human
Relations Award" in honor of a family member who had been an ADL national
commissioner. In 1995 a Newhouse publication, US West, became
partners in a cable TV deal with Time-Warner Entertainment. [BRUCK,
p. 56]
In an entire volume
about the secretive Newhouse media empire, Thomas Maier reported in 1994
that
"Some Newhouse
publications rank among the most celebrated in the world; others boast
virtual monopolies of the daily press in several American cities ...
With few remaining independent voices -- and an
oligarchy of media
power held by a handful of conglomerates like Newhouses's -- it
is hard not to come under his sway ... Most Americans know
little about Si Newhouse -- the most influential media baron of our time
... The full extent of the Newhouse family's ethical lapses in handling
so important a public institution as a major daily
newspaper, however,
remains virtually unknown even among today's
media cognoscenti.
There are repeated examples of Newhouse's papers' union
busting, political malleability, and their willingness to
allow advertisers
to influence improperly their editorial judgment."
[MAIER, p. 2, 6]
In the magazine end
of the business, noted Maier, "Si Newhouse.... celebrated the
acquisitiveness of the eighties ... [Vanity Fair, for instance]
seemed to capture the trappings of every nuance of the decade's greed,
avarice, and power ... [MEIR, p. 8] ... By the early 1990s, with a
nationwide recession and an ever-widening gap between rich and poor,
Newhouse's critics saw a more sinister motive in this redefinition of the
media. To many the Conde Nast stylization of celebrity and
gossip over the previous decade became a permanent part of the American
cultural diet." [MAIER, p. 11]
Commenting on a 1994
Vanity Fair article about the new Hollywood mogul clique, William
Cash noted that "there is something very obvious ... that does bind most of
the leading members of the so-called 'New Establishment'
-- or the Titans of Tripe, as Auberon Waugh recently called them -- only no
magazine in America (especially a Conde Nast publication owned by Si
Newhouse) would point it out: they are predominantly Jewish." [CASH, p. 15]
Over the years, the
Newhouses have been involved in essentially "hostile takeovers" of a number
of firms, including the New Yorker and Random House. A news
story appearing on the cover of the Cleveland Plain Dealer about a
local Teamster union boss, rewritten under pressure from the Newhouses to
accommodate Mafia influence, created outrage among editors, reporters and
other staffers at the paper, resulting in the amazing spectacle of about
fifty Plain Dealer employees picketing their own offices.
(Among Si Newhouse's
close friends, since childhood, was Roy Cohn -- the prominent Jewish
prosecutor for senator Joe McCarthy during the 1950s witch hunt
investigations for "unAmerican activities." In later
trials for bribery, conspiracy, and other charges against Cohn, it was
revealed that the old McCarthyite's associates have included Jewish
gangsters Moe Dalitz and Meyer Lansky, as well as Mafiosos like Vito
Genovese and Tony (Fats) Salerno. Cohn's role for the Newhouses, says Thomas
Maier, was "as a go-between with the mob and Newhouse officials." [MAIER, p.
118] A Cohn law firm partner, Stanley Friedman, who was also head of the
Bronx Democratic Party, was imprisoned for corruption; another business
partner, Sam Garfield, was a "stock swindler." Comedian Joey Bishop, a
performer at many of Cohn's parties, noted that "my opening line -- this is
a typical Roy Cohn dinner -- [was] 'If you're indicted you're invited.'"
[VON HOFFMAN, p. 272] Cohn's connections were diverse; he also had a "long
lasting friendship" with Jewish media personality Barbara Walters, as well
as with Walter Winchell. [MAIER, p. 89, 98, 103] He
claimed to have come close to marrying Walters in his younger years. [VON
HOFFMAN, p. 23])
Thomas Maier noted
the disturbing implications of the Cleveland Plain Dealer
Mafia-influenced episode:
"What happened to
the Plain Dealer was a ... powerful warning to
Americans concerned
about the integrity of their news media and
how it can be
improperly tainted and professionally compromised.
In an era in which
many of America's major cities are increasingly serviced by only one
daily newspaper -- acting in each city like private
utilities with
almost complete control on the printed word -- the lessons were indeed
profound. The actions in Cleveland would forever mark Si
Newhouse and his
company as unworthy stewards of a public trust, a flawed vessel for so
important a task as the free flow of information in a democratic
society. And with so much at stake, it raises the question
of what an informed
public would do about it if only they knew the full extent of
the story." [MAIER, p. 118-119]
In their expanding
empire, the Newhouses have come close to establishing virtual news
monopolies in at least five American cities -- St. Louis, Portland (Oregon),
Birmingham, Syracuse, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania -- "where Newhouse owned
not only the [only] daily newspaper but also a television and radio station
or a cable-television franchise, as well." [MAIER, p. 26] As early as 1960
Oregon Congressman Wayne Morse, responding to the situation in Portland
(where the Newhouses purchased the two competing newspapers and merged them
together) declared on the Senate floor that "The American people need to be
warned before it is too late about the threat which is arising as a result
of the monopolistic practices of the Newhouse interests." [MAIER, p. 25] The
Newhouse family was also involved in one of the most famous tax court cases
in history when the IRS decided the value of Advance Publications,
in its earlier years, to be worth $2.1 billion. The family claimed its
holdings were worth $182 million. "By claiming that every business decision
had been made by the family as a group," says Moment magazine, "not
solely by their father, the Newhouses won the case -- a victory that
gladdened the hearts of tycoons everywhere and is now common practice."
[MOMENT, p. 36]
Sam Newhouse also
was involved in helping a Jewish friend in founding a publishing empire in
the distribution field. " A near monopoly [by the 1980s]," noted Alfred
Lilienthal, "in the news distribution field in New York lies in the hands of
Henry Garfinkel's corporation, National Services, which owns
the Union News Company." [LILIENTHAL, p. 220] "Let's face it,"
Garfinkel once said about Sam Newhouse, "we were best friends. Anything I
could do to help the man, I'd do." [MAIER, p. 96] McCarthyite lawyer Roy
Cohn eventually worked for Garfinkel and helped engineer the takeover of the
American News Company. Renamed AnCorp National
Services, Garfinkel "gained a near stranglehold on the distribution of
newspapers and magazines in the Northeast." [MAIER, p. 96] At one point in
time, Garfinkel's companies controlled 50% of the newsstands in America.
[MAIER, p. 96] In the 1960s the Wall Street Journal turned up
links between Garfinkel's business and the criminal underworld; in 1971 the
Federal Trade Commission filed suit against AnCorp for
"improper payments" involving the New York Times and
New York Daily News. [MAIER, p. 97]
By 2000, another
media conglomerate, the New York-based Primedia, owned 250
magazines, 232 business and consumer information forums, it owned 47 trade
shows, and had sales of $1.7 billion. Jewish mogul Henry Kravis controlled
over 80% of the company through his Kohlberg Kravis Roberts investment
monster [described earlier]. [FOLIO, FIRST DAY, 9-23-99] Kravis and Jewish
KKR partners George Roberts and Michael Tokarz sit on Primedia's
Board of Directors. Meyer Feldberg is another Jew on the Board. (The
chairman of company, Tom Rogers, and Vice-Chairman, Beverly Chell, may both
be Jewish too, Rogers and Chell are sometimes Jewish surnames).
Primedia owns magazines and journals across the spectrum of America,
including American Baby, Chicago, New York, Modern
Bride, Soap Opera Digest, Tiger Beat, 16 Magazine,
Canoe and Kayak, Surfing, Off Road, Truckin',
Crafts Magazine, Arabian Horse World, American History,
Civil War Times, Fly Fisherman, Dog World, Quiltmaker,
Pro Football Weekly, and on and on. Divisions include HPC
Publishing (113 publications in 38 states) and Internec. "Primedia
publishes the largest number of magazine ad pages of any media company in
the country ... eighty-four percent of the company's products are ranked #1
or #2 in their respective markets." [PRIMEDIA ONLINE HOME PAGE; and
intertec.com.about.news; 9-27-99, ONLINE]
By the 1980s another
Jewish family, the Annenbergs, owned Triangle Publications,
which owned the largest read periodical in America: TV Guide, as well
as Seventeen, (once edited by Enid [Annenberg] Haupt), the
Philadelphia Daily News (and, for a time its rival, the Philadelphia
Inquirer), the Miami Tribune, and the Daily Racing form,
among other media holdings, including six television and nine radio
stations, plus 27 cable TV franchises. [BIRMINGHAM, p. xii]
(President Ronald Reagan was often a vacation guest at Walter
Annenberg's resort home in Palm Springs). Walter's wife Lenore is "a niece
of the Hollywood mogul Harry Cohn and a former wife of [Jewish millionaire ]
distiller Lewis S. Rosentiel). [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 121] The Annenbergs also
are major shareholders in the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Campbell Soup
Company. [MOMENT, p. 39] They have also owned a range of
movie fan magazines, including True, ScreenGuide, and
Detective. The founder of all this, Moses Annenberg, was convicted of
income tax evasion, fined eight million dollars, and spent three years in
prison. [BIRMINGHAM, p. xii] His "national monopoly on
the dissemination of horse race results back in the 1920s was allegedly
facilitated by underworld figures." [CHRISTOPHER, p. 103] "It has been
said," notes Robert Rockaway, "that Moe [Annenberg] was to the bookie of
America what Arnold Rothstein was to the bootleggers and narcotics peddlers.
He put the racket on a business-like basis." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 200]
The Chicago district attorney once called Annenberg "a murderer and a
thief." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 201]
The Annenburg
Foundation has given 15 million dollars to the United Jewish Appeal for the
resettlement of Soviet refugees in Israel, another million a year to the UJA,
as well as a million to Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Donations
to non-Jewish organizations include 150 million dollars to PBS. Walter
Annenberg also founded the University of Southern California's Annenberg
School of Communications.
In 1962 Walter
Annenberg personally censored an ABC program about friend Richard Nixon that
was scheduled to appear on the ABC-affiliates he owns, including
WFIL-TV in Philadelphia and WNHC-TV in New Haven. As John
Cooney notes, "Annenberg believed himself the judge of what was good for the
public, and ... his media complex enabled him to arbitrarily censor a news
program on television and then explain in print [his Philadelphia newspaper]
why he had done so." [COONEY, p. 280] (Annenberg was appointed by Nixon to
be the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain in 1969).
Real estate investor
Mortimer Zuckerman (who became an American citizen in
1977) by 1995 owned the U.S. News and World Report, (where he had
earlier installed himself as editor-in-chief of America's third largest news
weekly magazine), the Atlantic Monthly, and the New York Daily
News. He is also the founder of an organization
called the Zionist Forum, and in 2001 became the head of the President's
Conference of Major Jewish Organizations. "Zuckerman has used the
Atlantic Monthly," says J. J. Goldberg, "to publish ... occasional
pieces that manage, ever so slightly, to shift debate toward what might be
called a Jewish way of seeing the world." [GOLDBERG, p.299] On one occasion,
Zuckerman (a former boyfriend of Jewish feminist Gloria Steinem) addressed
an American Friends of the Israeli Museum of the Diaspora fundraising dinner
with a "35 minute jeremiad on the continuing dangers of anti-Jewish
hostility all over the world and in America. He cited Arab threats to
Israel, anti-Semites among American Blacks, and an anti-Israeli bias in the
American news media." [GOLDBERG, p. 70] Zuckerman, notes the (Jewish)
Forward, has fore grounded his "advocacy of Israel in discussions with
Secretary [of State] Albright ... His column in U.S. News and World
Report [is] evidence of his pro-Israeli tilt. He penned a dissent in
defense of Israel in a Council on Foreign Relations report on the Middle
East and has helped to rejuvenate the America-Israeli Friendship League, of
which he is president." [FORWARD, 11-14-97, p. 14]
Zuckerman, the real estate developer ("one of the largest owners and
developers of office buildings in the country") [MATUSOW, p. 55], even
sought to ruin a major icon of American intellectual and naturalist history
-- Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau's famous woodsy refuge site of personal
contemplation and reflection against the noise of rat race barons like
Zuckerman. "[Zuckerman] gave new meaning to the term 'rapacious developer,'"
noted Regardie's Magazine, "by sticking to his plan to put up an
office park next to Thoreau's Walden Pond." [REGARDIE'S,
p. 64]
Regarding Zuckerman's
avid Zionism, Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation in Boston, notes
that:
"Each step that an
owner of a news organization takes deeper into
partisan
activities of any kind makes a difference. It raises fundamental
questions about
the purpose for which that person chooses to own news outlets." [MATUSOW,
p. 55]
Even when his
billionaire chum Michael Milken was making news for his various financial
scandals, Zuckerman instructed his Atlantic Monthly staff not to use
the popular "junk-bond king' label to describe him, but, rather, "besieged
financial genius." [MATUSOW, p. 55] Conversely, when the
New York Times ran a critical story called "Mortimer Zuckerman: a
Developer Who Thrives on High-Stakes Dealing," the Jewish executive editor
at the Times, A. M. Rosenthal, responded by calling underling editors
into his office. Chummy with Zuckerman, only two days earlier Rosenthal had
dined with him and his then-girlfriend, Gloria Steinem. As Joseph Goulden
notes, Rosenthal assailed the editors and condemned the Zuckerman piece in
an in-house memo for allegedly "opinionated phrases
and unattributed characterizations. The article established a tone
that cast its subject in an unfavorable light. Describing Mr. Zuckerman's real
estate acquisitions, the article uses the phrase 'more than five years
of plotting.' It said he had befriended people 'in an effort to win a
place in their world.' His latest major purchase... 'does not sate
him.’.... [etc.] " [GOULDEN, p. 288]
(Gordon Thomas,
British author of a 1999 volume about Israel's Mossad, fingers Rosenthal an
Israeli sayan, an undercover American "helper" of the foreign
spy network). [HOWE, R., 6-99, p. 47]
The Jewish Ziff family
(worth $3 billion), until it started selling off many of its media holdings
in the mid-1990s, owned half a dozen TV stations and over 35 periodicals
including Popular Photography, Popular Electronics, Car and
Driver, Stereo Review, PC (Personal Computer) Magazine,
and PC Week. Before modern Israel was founded,
patriarch William Ziff wrote a book called The Rape of Palestine,
notes Lenni Brenner, "which favored a Zionist alliance with Mussolini."
[BRENNER, p. 78]
The Pritzker family
(worth $6 billion) has owned the 140 Hyatt hotels,
Royal Caribbean cruise ships, Braniff and
Continental Airlines, McCall's magazine, Ticketmaster
(the ticket outlet that some rock and roll groups have assailed for its high
prices and monopolistic practices -- in 1998 Jewish mogul Barry Diller's
USA Networks acquired it; its CEO and president remains
Frederic Rosen), and Coast-to-Coast Savings and Loan. They also
own the Marmon Group, which controls companies making
everything from gloves to missile parts.
Sumner Redstone
(formerly Murray Rothstein, worth $3.4 billion) began as a liquor
wholesaler, and graduated from a 12-chain theatre operation to 855 of them.
He is currently the chairman of National Amusements, Inc. In
1987 he acquired the media giant Viacom, Inc.
Redstone's other subsidiaries include the Blockbuster Video
chain; the Simon and Schuster, Charles Scribners Sons, Twayne,
MacMillan, Pocket Books, Fireside Books, the Free Press, Jossey-Bass, and
Prentice-Hall publishing houses; Spelling Television (Aaron
Spelling: chairman of the board); and Paramount studios.
Paramount in turn owns the New York Knicks
basketball team and the NewYork Rangers Hockey
team. Viacom also owns the MTV and Nickelodeon
cable TV companies, as well as Showtime. It also shares
ownership of the USA and SciFi channels. "Redstone's
donations to Jewish charities have won him honors from the American Jewish
Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the B'nai B'rith and Jewish
philanthropies of Greater Boston." [MOMENT]

The former president of National
Amusements and publisher of The Jewish Advocate (as well as the
ex-husband of Redstone's daughter) is Ira Korff, a direct descendant of the
Baal Shem Tov -- the founder of Hasidism in the 18th century. Korff
eventually decided to accept the Hasidic hereditary mantle of the Hasidic
"Grand Rabbi." As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz notes:

"Korff says that the worst purveyeor of violence and profantiy on TV is
Music
Television (MTV), which is owned by Viacom. But, he
adds, 'I have no interest
in attacking Viacom, and MTV is an ethically run
business.' After all, much of
his own wealth was made while serving as president and later consultant
to
National Amusements Inc., a large movie-theatre chain which olds the
majority
of shares in Viacom, the world's second-largest media company (to AOL
Time Warner Inc.) Furthermore, his first wife, Shari Restone, is the
daughter
of Sumner Redstone, chairman and CEO of Viacom, and Korff's
three children
from that marriage will likely profit from their grandfather's fortune.
Forbes
recently estimated Restone's personal worth at $14 billion." [HAUSMAN,
T,
6-22-01]

(Viacom's Paramount TV network, United
Paramount Network (UPN), is actually a joint venture with
BHC Communications, which is a subsidiary of
Chris-Craft Industries. Jewish entrepreneur Herbert Siegel has
controlled Chris-Craft since the late 1960s. UPN
reaches over 91% of American homes through 150 television affiliates.
[HOOVER, p. 225])
"At mighty
Paramount," noted Jewish screenwriter Ben Stein in 1996, "the
controlling stockholder is Sumner Redstone. Head of the Studio is Jon
Dolgren. [Dolgren, formerly president of Sony Pictures and
Columbia Pictures, was awarded the Wiesenthal Center's 1997
"Humanitarian Award."] Head of Production is Sherry Lansing -- all members
of my tribe ... At newly energized ICM [International
Creative Management], the top dogs are Jeff Berg and Jim Wiatt. At still
overwhelming CAA [Creative Artist Management],
Jack Rapke and other members of my faith predominate. At William
Morris John Burnham and other Jews are, by and large, in the power
positions [1997 president: Jerry Katzman]. This has always been true in
Hollywood." [STEIN, E! LINE]
Stein here refers to
the three major Hollywood "talent agencies," all predominantly Jewish. These
firms are so influential in Hollywood that for years in the 1990s, Michael
Ovitz, the Jewish head of CAA, was rated by Premiere
magazine as the most powerful person in Hollywood. As early as 1986, the
Wall Street Journal wrote that "it seemed that Michael Ovitz really was
Hollywood's most powerful power broker." [SLATER, p. 176] In 1989 Time
noted that "nearly everyone agrees that Ovitz, 42, president of
Creative Artists Agency, is possibly the most powerful figure in
Hollywood." [SLATER, p. 200-201] Ovitz even personally arranged for his
martial arts instructor, Steven Seagal, to become a movie star. [SLATER, p.
181]
Ovitz formed
CAA in 1975 with fellow William Morris defectors Michael
Rosenfeld, Ron Meyer, Bill Haber, and Rowland Perkins. Martin Baum joined as
a sixth partner later. When CAA was formed, one of the first
things the five founders did was to each buy a Jaguar automobile, to create
a proper "image." [SLATER, p. 69-70] The first two hirees at CAA
were Amy Grossman and Laurie Perlman, both later elevated to agent status.
In 1995 the San
Francisco Chronicle called the CEO of ICM, Jeff Berg, "the
second most powerful man in Hollywood." [GUTHRIE, SECOND, p. C13] In 1993
ICM joined with Artmedia, Europe's largest talent
agency, to form ICM France in Paris. In 1995 the Hollywood
Reporter fired one of its staff writers for suing ICM. "The
incident promises to renew troubling questions," noted the Los Angeles
Times, "about the relationship between the entertainment industry and
the publications that cover it." [COLLINS, Hollywood, D6]
Major agents at
William Morris included the legendary Abe Lastfogel, as well as
Phil Weltman, Sam Weisbrod, Lew Weiss, Barry Diller, Robert Shapiro, and
many others. Until he died of AIDS, Stan Kamen was "the most prominent
talent agent of the day [1980s]." [SLATER, p. 93]
Another prominent agent/lawyer was Mickey Rudin. His sister, Elizabeth
Greenson, noted that she "watched Mickey create an atmosphere of demand for
Frank [Sinatra], that he was desirable." [KELLEY, K., p. 305]
Freddie Fields, "the chairman of [Creative Management Associates],
was the most powerful motion-picture agent in the business ... He was
married to actress Polly Bergen, and [with] his partner, David Begelman,
oversaw the most envied client list of Hollywood's stars, including Henry
Fonda, [Judy Garland], Natalie Wood, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Barbara
Streisand." [KING, T., 2000, p. 127]

Irving "Swifty" Lazar was also for decades one of Hollywood's most
powerful agents; an invitation to his post-Academy Awards party was a
measure of high Hollywood status. Sandy Gallin, "by the
time he was thirty ... was the mastermind of an elite coven of entertainment
superstars that included Dolly Parton, Cher, and Michael Jackson." He was
also a member a group of Jewish homosexual moguls known in the elite party
world as the "Velvet Mafia"; it included clothes designer Calvin Klein,
movie/TV mogul Barry Diller, record mogul David Geffen, and Steve Rubell,
among others. [GAINES/ CHURCHER, p. 206, 209-210] Steve Rubell headed New
York's Studio 54 nightclub, "the greatest nightclub of all
time." Steven Gaines and Sharon Churcher note that Studio 54's
reputation was that of "a destructive, malevolent place, a septic tank that
glorified drug use and promiscuity." [GAINES/CHURCHER, p. 206, 209-210]

"through Jack La Vien [a common form of Levine], a friend of [Krantz's
husband Steven, also Jewish] we became members of an exclusive club
that
dominated the chic New York disco scene. It was called Le Club,
and
everyone wanted to get all done up in pretty clothes, go there, and
dance. This was
a decade before the Studio 54 scene and pretty clothes were
still desirable.
Jack was one of those socially gifted men who seemed to know absolutely
everybody in London and New York." [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 221]In her autobiography,
Jewish comedian Joan Rivers notes the many agents and managers she had
(which of them, one wonders, is notJewish?) who "had
once carried my hopes" in her long, torturous road to media stardom:
"Irwin Arthur,
Freddie Weintraub, Jack Segal, Marty Erlichman,
Charlie Joffe, Bob
Shanks, Jack Rollins, Paul Keyes, Roy Silver, Tony Rivers. [And]
every agent or secretary or manager, large
and small, that I had
ever phoned or waved to or used their ladies' room. Julius Monk,
Irving Haber, Lenny Jacobson. This is your
life, Joan Rivers."
[RIVERS, p. 337]
Earlier Rivers agents
also included Hamilton Katz. Another she ran across, Ira Ring, was one of
the clique of agents who controlled bookings at hotels in New York's
Catskill mountain resorts. "Most of them," notes Rivers, "were sleazy and
liars." [RIVERS, p. 170] Another Jewish agent, Bernie Sohn, helped her get a
position in Chicago's Second City improvisation comedy team.
Second City's producer was also Jewish, Bernie Sahlin. The director was
Paul Sills, later replaced by Alan Meyerson. [RIVERS, p. 263-264, 278]
Rivers later worked for a miserable time at Candid Camera as a
writer for Allen Funt (also Jewish). Much-hated by
employees, Rivers describes Funt as the "Hitler" [RIVERS, p. 363] of the
popular program.
ICM's
most powerful agent in the 70's and 80's was probably "Holocaust survivor"
Sue Mengers. "Mengers," notes Rachel Abramowitz, "ruled Hollywood as the
outrageous, mouthy, impudent, muumuu-swaddled agent to the stars." Fellow
Jewish agent Martin Baum, Mengers says, taught her "total aggression."
Clients included Burt Reynolds, Gene Hackman, Candice Bergman, Barbara
Streisand and many other prominent movie stars. "When Mengers finally became
rich, she used to luxuriate in breakfast in bed, served by a Portugese
maid." [ABRAMOWITZ, R., 2000, p. 39, 41] (In April 1998, ICM
chairman Marvin Josephson and Merv Adelson, the former CEO and chairman of
Lorimar, co-chaired the "jubilee committee" that ran the
"Hollywood extravaganza" program on CBS that commemorated Israel's 50th
anniversary, "Israel at 50." Both men, noted the Jewish Journal of Los
Angeles, "were appointed to serve as international co-chairmen of the
50th celebration at the behest of Israel's prime minister, Benyamin
Netanyahu." Josephson has even served as treasurer for a
pro-Israel lobbying group, the National Political Action Committee.)
In earlier years,
Jules Stein's and Lew Wasserman's MCA (Music Corporation of
America) was so prominent in the talent agency business that it was known as
"the Octopus." [BROWNSTEIN, p. 182] "By 1936 [MCA]
controlled every band of any consequence in America." [MCDOUGAL, p. 43] Ever
expanding, "through the 1950s MCA became the dominant force in
television production." [BROWNSTEIN, p. 183]
By 1960, notes
Michael Pye, Jules Stein
"was the ultimate
power in more than half of American show business,
agents to the stars
in theatre, cinema, television, and he kept it bland.
He became the power
that dominated the schedules of NBC ... Almost a
third of prime
television in the 1950s came from the corporate machine
he fashioned. When
finally the Justice Department put his business in a
courtroom and
challenged its scale and power, he had already decided to abandon his agency
... [PYE, p. 18-19] ... It is hard to overestimate the
power and ambition
of the empire Jules Stein built. It dominated the agency business,
with perhaps 60 per cent of the star business worth having in music,
movies, and television. It dominated prime-time television ... Lew
Wasserman, as the operating head of the agency, was
regarded by
consensus as the most powerful man in Hollywood." [PYE,
p. 60]
MCA has
long been alleged to have been built with ties to organized crime. An
advisor to President Lyndon Johnson, notes the Washington Post,
"recalls that the White House only considered Wasserman but never offered
the job [of Secretary of Commerce] to him because of worries that
confirmation hearings would turn up embarrassing details about his ties to
Hollywood's shadowy side." [FARHI, p. G1]
Another MCA
mogul, Sonny Werbler, head of MCA-TV and later president and
CEO of the New York Jets professional football team, was
described by a Variety reporter in 1965:
"In more than three
decades, Werblin wielded more influence, made made more money, made
and broke more careers, than any other show biz impresario
in New York." [MOLDEA, p. 237]
Jews are of course
predominant in the literary agency world (which blends into the
entertainment milieu) as well. Albert Zuckerman, for
example, is "one of New York's most successful millionaire literary agents,"
with a stable of writers including Ken Follett and Zuckerman's own wife,
Ellen Goudge. [LORA, p. 15] Dallas-based Evan Fogelman is "the prince of the
romance novel ... He has built the Fogelman Literary Agency
into a force in the industry, one that includes among its authors some of
the biggest names in romance: Kathleen Sutcliffe, Julie Beard, Anne Eames,
and Peggy Webb, among others." [BIEDERMAN, C., 10-23-97] At agent Joan Daves'
death in 1997 she "was regarded as one of the world's foremost agents for
serious and intellectual fiction and nonfiction." Her
clients included six Nobel Prize winners. [GEIDER, L., 6-27-97]
An early CAA
merger deal with the Adams, Ray, and Rosenberg Literary Agency
fell through, but CAA head Michael Ovitz eventually worked out
cooperative, mutual development deals with another agency, headed by Mort
Jankow. (There was "no literary agent more important than Mort Jankow,"
notes Robert Slater. [SLATER, p. 66]) Jankow's literary clients still
include best-selling authors Judith Krantz, Danielle Steel, Jackie Collins,
and Sidney Sheldon. (Janklow's wife, Linda, was the granddaughter of Harry
Warner, one of the founders of Warner Brothers). [KRANTZ, J., 2000,
p. 209] Later Ovitz lured literary agent Steve Roth away from the
Ziegler-Roth literary agency. When, under increasing media scrutiny,
Ovitz hired a public relations company in 1988 to deal with the media for
CAA, it was Howard J. Rubenstein Associates.
[SLATER, p. 200]
Dennis McDougal notes
the case of MCAin the literary world:
"MCA
began buying up New York literary agencies, including the Jay Sanford Agency and
the Liebling-Wood Agency, which gave MCAcontrol of the
nation's three best-known playwrights: Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and
Arthur Miller." [MCDOUGAL, p. 151]
Another example of
the talent agency network system is the case of Jane Sindell, described in
1997 by the Los Angeles Times as "one of the top literary agents in
the business," a veteran of all three of the most powerful talent agencies
-- CAA, ICM, and the William Morris
Agency. Married to TV writer David Hurwitz, her mother worked for
prominent Hollywood screenwriter Herman Mankiewcz. Her uncle (Sam Jaffe)
founded his own talent agency, as did her father (the Sindell
Agency), her uncle (the Gersh Agency), and her brother
Richard. [ELLER, Top, p. D9] Uncle Sam Jaffe was "the pre-eminent
Hollywood agent for the 1930s through the 1950s [who] managed the careers of
stars, notably Humphrey Bogart, Richard Burton, and David Niven." [KIRSCHNER,
S., 4-27-00, p. 13] Nat Letfowitz was another top agent at the William
Morris Agency. His cousin Ted Ashley headed the Ashley Famous
agency (which represented the likes of John Wayne, William Holden, and
Tennessee Williams). [KING, T., 2000, p. 88]
Prominent author
Scott Berg's family includes a father who was an MGM
screenwriter, a brother who heads powerhouse Hollywood talent agency
ICM, another who is a record producer at (Jewish-owned)
Geffen Records, and a third who is a literary agent. [SCHLEIER,
1-29-99, p. 31] Until his death in 2000, Arthur Pine (born Pincus) owned
"one of the most dynamic literary agencies." He started out in the
entertainment agency business, representing "Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Milton
Berle, George Burns, Sammy Cahn, Phil Silvers, and the rest of Tinseltown's
Jewish mafia." [NOLAN, F., 11-1-00, p. 6]
From her experience
managing her famous sister Roseanne, Geraldine Barr (also Jewish) notes the
way that Hollywood networking (agents, and other wheelers and dealers) works
for those who hope to rise as "stars" there: "The power situation is one
where you are buying access to the system that is Hollywood. In the early
stages of your career, there is no free lunch. A rising star will ultimately
pay as much as 75 percent of earnings just to enter the world where real
fame and fortune can be achieved. If the star were a box of cereal, she
would be buying shelf space in supermarkets and advertising in newspapers.
In Hollywood, you buy the people who can put you in the position you need
for success." [BARR, p. 159-160]
Jews are of course
also predominant in radio. Norman Pattiz, for instance, has been for years
the chairman of Westwood One, which "is America's largest
producer and distributor of radio programming" and the parent company of
Mutual Broadcasting System, the NBC Radio Network,
CBS News Radio, Fox News Radio, CNN Radio, the
Source, NBC Talknet, and the Westwood One Radio
Network." Its programs are featured on over 7,500 radio stations around
the world. By 1988, it was even producing 200 rock and
roll concerts a year. The "single biggest stockholder of Westwood One,
the nation's largest radio network" is also Jewish: David Saperstein. [PR
NEWSWIRE; MOTHER JONES, 5-3-01]
In 1991 Bruce Kanter
was named Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of the
Westwood One company. Another Jewish executive, Martin
Rubenstein, was the CEO of Mutual Broadcasting until 1984; in
1986 he became the CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Among the many Jewish reporters in commercial radio is Ellen Ratner, "White
House correspondent and bureau chief for Talk Radio News Service."
She was formerly the co-host of the widely syndicated Good Day USA.
[SPEVACK, V., 5-5-2000, p. 48]

In the government realm, Marc Nathanson was appointed twice by President
Bill Clinton to be "chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors,
which oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other
federal broadcasting services ... Nathanson founded Falcon Communications.
In 1999, he sold the company to Charter Communications for $3.5
million, creating the nation's fourth-largest cable operator. Nathanson
remains one of the largest individual stockholders and vice chairman of
Charter's board. He is also a director of the Digital Entertainment
Network and the National Cable Television Association ... He
recently ventured into online entertainment, making an undisclosed
investment in iFilm." [MOTHER JONES, 5-3-01]

During Jewish
executive Frank Mankiewcz's tenure as the president of National
Public Radio in the 1980s, "many credit him with popularizing the pubic
radio network and raising the number of listeners." [DE WITT, p. 13] He (son
of a famous Hollywood screenwriter) later became vice-chairman of
Hill and Knowlton Worldwide Publishers. His vice president for
programming at NPR (later Washington bureau chief for
CBS) was Barbara Cohen. Since 1971 at NPR, Jewish reporter
Susan Stamberg has been the on-air "first lady of radio," for the first
fourteen years the host of prominent morning program All Things
Considered and later Weekend Edition. [STAMBERG, jacket
blurb] The Executive Producer of All Things Considered is
Ellen Weiss. Her husband is Rabbi David Saperstein. [OSTROFF, H., 7-23-91,
p. 1] (In 1994, Weiss named a controversial African-American on death row,
innocent hero for some, Mumia Abu-Jamal, as a "regular commentator" on NPR.
[ABU-JAMAL, M., 2000, p. 27] Abu-Jamal's literary agent was also Jewish,
Frances Goldin).
NPR's
White House correspondent? Also Jewish: Mara Liasson. NPR
reporter Lina Gradstein is an Orthodox Jew. (Can we remotely imagine a
comparable Christian fundamentalist as a reporter at the liberal public
radio network?) In 2000, yet another Jew, Jeffrey Dvorkin, was named to the
new post as National Public Radio's ombudsman. He formerly
worked as the Vice President for News at NPR; before that, he
was in the same position at the Canadian Broadcast Corporation.
Why not a Jewish ombudsman? As the Cleveland Jewish News notes,
"[Dvorkin] notes that
Jewish listeners comprise more than 20 percent of NPR's
audience. A significant number of Jews, like himself, also work at the radio
network." [KARFIELD, M., 6-23-2000, p. 27]
Other prominent Jewish
NPR figures include Ira Glass (host and producer of
This American Life, Robert Siegel (co-host of All Things
Considered), and David Isay and his Associate Producer Stacy Abramson --
contributors to All Things Considered). Rabbi Lawrence Kushner
is a "regular commentator" to the same program. [PROVIDENCE
JOURNAL-BULLETIN, 5-1-99] Senior editor for the All Things
Considered weekend edition is Jonathan Broder, also a writer for
Israel's Jerusalem Report. Scott Simon (whose father was Jewish), now
hosts Weekend Edition and has "one of the most familiar voices
on radio." (In 1997 Catholic groups protested Weekend Edition's
satirical song of Catholic ritual called 'The Vatican Rag.'
"NPR is taking great delight in offending Catholics,"
objected William Donahue, of a Catholic defense organization, "They would
not be disparaging of blacks, Jews, and gays. This rank hypocrisy and double
standard is what gets our ire up.") [MCCORD, J., 6-12-97, p. 57]
Ketzel Lavine is the
"funny gardener" on the Weekend program. Charles Mayer is "one
of the new members of NPR, a young producer." [JULIAN, S.,
6-6-2000] Michael Feldman hosts Whad'ya Know? Terry Gross is
host of NPR's Fresh Air (co-producer: Naomi
Person). Even Ray Suarez, of Puerto Rican heritage, has a Jewish mother. For
six and a half years he hosted NPR's Talk of the Town program
until he recently moved to PBS television as a "senior
correspondent" for the News Hour with Jim Lehrer. [DIAZ, K.,
10-28-99] (The director of the Lehrer news hour is David Deutch.) Likewise,
David Brancaccio, host of NPR's Marketplace, is of
Jewish/Italian descent.
For many years too,
the head of the most important NPR radio station in the second
largest American radio market (Los Angeles), has been Ruth (Hirshman)
Seymour. Seymour, notes the Los Angeles Times, "shaped the public
radio station KCRW in her own image ... Hawkish on behalf of
Israel, Seymour and KCRW often seem to fixate on the Middle
East and Europe and, until recently, hardly seemed to acknowledge the
existence of Los Angeles." [RUSSELL, p. A1] Among her pet projects was a
13-week 32-story collaboration between KCRW and the National
Yiddish Book Center [which opened its new Amherst, Massachusetts $8 million
building in 1997] to air Eastern European Jewish short stories to a
nationwide audience. [MARGOLICK, p. 3] (Another nationally "acclaimed
National Public Radio series" was Great Jewish Stories
from Eastern Europe and Beyond). [BIGA, L., 4-14-2000, p. 34]
Meanwhile, in the
commercial radio world, Mel Karmazin, was described by the New York Daily
News in 1997 as "one of the most powerful and richest men in the media
business." His personal fortune is estimated at over $200 million. He headed
"the CBS broadcasting giant’s most precious properties: it's
string of 14 TV stations and 77 radio stations and is poised to take over
the entire network." [FURMAN, p. 31] The CBS
radio group was by 1998 America's largest radio company in terms of
revenues, at $1.5 billion. In 1998 Karmazin became the chairman and CEO of
the resurrected Infinity Broadcasting division, which he had
sold to CBS two years earlier for $3.9 billion. CBS
has also acquired the then fifth largest radio company -- American
Radio Systems -- during Karmazin's tenure. Among other accomplishments,
Karmazin resurrected the career of decadent Jewish radio talk show host
Howard Stern when he was fired by WNBC in 1985. "At the time," notes the
Daily News, "Stern was under siege. Parents and religious groups
regularly protested his provocative broadcasts and boycotted his advertisers
... No matter what Stein did on the air, whether it was lesbian dial-a-date
or celebrating his own flatulence, Karmazin stuck with him," eventually even
paying a "$1.7 million settlement to the Federal Trade Commission to settle
indecency charges against Stern." [FURMAN, p. 31]
"During is career in radio," noted the Washington Post, "Mr.
Karmazin championed the notion of favoring good ratings over just about
everything else, including taste." [SCHWARTZ, p. 13]
Karmazin, head of the
CBS Station Group (radio and television) in May 1997 became
Chief Operating Officer of the CBS corporation. By January
1998, notes the New York Times, "he muscled aside the CBS
Chief Executive Officer, Michael Jordan ... for the top job," finally
reigning over all of the firm. [ELLIOT, S., p. 16] Following the pattern of
more and more centralized media monopolies, in September 1999 CBS
merged into the aforementioned Viacom, headed by another Jewish
mogul, Sumner Redstone. Karmazin was now the president and Chief Operating
Officer of the new Viacom, number 2 man behind Redstone, but
all divisions reported to him. "Mr. Redstone," noted the New York Times,
"predicted that when his position finally became vacant, Mr. Karmazin would
get the job." [ELLIOT, p. 16] Viacom now ruled CBS,
MTV, the Nashville Network, Nickelodeon,
Paramount, Simon and Schuster, VH1,
the Blockbuster video chain, and on and on. And who is chairman
of CBS Television? Leslie Moonves, is also Jewish [ELKIN, M.,
7-13-2000], and reputed to be a distant relative of David Ben-Gurion, the
first prime minister of Israel. Only a month after the World Trade Center
terrorist attack, he was under fire by some for his consideration of a new
sitcom show based on the atrocity. [LOS ANGELES TIMES, 10-20-01, p. F4]
In 1996 President
Bill Clinton responded to lobbying pressures from the entertainment media
and signed a bill deregulating American radio; companies had formerly been
limited to the ownership of two radio stations in any given geographical
market and 40 stations (20 on AM, 20 on FM) overall. The new law allowed the
ownership of up to eight stations in a given area, and the total number that
a company could own was now unlimited. In the next two and a half years,
4,000 of America's 11,000 radio stations changed ownership [FINANCIAL TIMES,
6-10-98, p. 24] as the richest companies rushed to expand into giant media
conglomerates, increasingly monopolizing and homogenizing the airwaves, and
creating what one professor called the "McDonaldization" of radio.
"More and more regulators, academics, and advertisers," noted the
Dallas Morning News, "worry that radio's merger-mania concentrates too
much power in too few hands." [DWORKIN, p. 1H]
Quickly, two radio
companies stood out as especially active in bloating themselves immediately
after Clinton's deregulation bill to gigantic status: Chancellor
Media, and Jacor Communications.
After a series of
massive buyouts of other companies, in late 1998 the Chancellor
Media corporation became America's largest radio broadcast company with
over 456 stations in 105 markets across America (it also owns or manages 12
TV stations). Its AMFM Radio Network was also created to
provide program syndication. It even owns the Primedia Broadcast
Group in Puerto Rico and 50% of Latin America's largest Latin American
radio company (in Mexico). Chancellor also owns 37,000 outdoor
advertising display boards in 37 states.
In 1998, the
president and CEO of Chancellor, Scott Ginsburg, resigned and
took with him a "severance" package worth $59 million. He was replaced by
another Jewish executive, Jeffery Marcus, the founder of Marcus
Cable, "the largest closely held U.S. cable TV company." [LA TIMES, p
4-30-98, p. 7] In 1997 another Jewish chief, David
Kanter, left the presidency of Disney's ABC Radio
Network to run Chancellor's AMFM Radio Network.
He was also named senior vice president of Chancellor.
The parent company (Hicks
Muse Tate and Furst) that owns Chancellor Media is not
Jewish-owned, but in 1998 it joined forces with the America's largest
private equity company, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (which is
Jewish) to create the largest chain of movie theatres in America -- Regal
Cinema. Plans were to own 20% of the total cinema screens in the nation
by 1999. [LEWIS, W, p. 2]
The Jacor
Communications rise to gigantic status is even more dramatic, zooming
from obscurity to become the third largest American radio broadcasting
corporation (after CBS and Chancellor). Starting
in early 1996 with 20 radio stations, by late 1998 it owned 205 in 56
cities. In 1997 alone Jacor paid $1.2 billion for 77 new
stations. "Jacor," noted the Associated Press," has gone
on a coast-to-coast buying spree that has raised eyebrows even in an era
when loosened controls on the broadcast industry have led us to widespread
purchase and consolidation of radio groups." [NOLAN] The
company was particularly interested in "clustering,” i.e., buying the
maximum number (eight) of radio stations in a given market including Denver,
San Diego, and Cincinnati. By 1997, Jacor had eighteen such
clusters throughout America. Aside from flirting with local information
monopolies (it is not impossible that the eight most dominant radio
stations in any given area could be owned by the same controller), the
economic effect of this is significant. Early in Jacor's buying spree, for
example, its Cincinnati stations cornered 44.3 percent of the radio
advertising dollar in that area.
Among Jacor's other
buys was also EFM Media Entertainment, the syndication company
that holds the rights to the number one rated radio talk show in America --
that of conservative political news commentator Rush Limbaugh. The next year
Jacor bought the rights to (Jewish) Laura Schlessinger's number two rated
talk show for $71.5 million. Jacor even bought a Christian
radio station in St. Louis, WCBW-FM.
For Limbaugh's part,
Susan Rosenbluth, editor of the Jewish Voice and Opinion, noted that
"as one who knows Limbaugh and has personally followed his career for many
years, I can assert categorically that his philo-Semitism and pro-Israel
stances are sincere and heartfelt." [ROSENBLUTH, S., 10-9-94]
In 1995, the New York Times featured an article on Limbaugh's
"legman" Joel Rosenberg, director of research for Limbaugh's Limbaugh
Newsletter. Posted in Washington DC, says the Times, Rosenberg
"is the eyes and
ears -- and, on occasion, the muscle -- of Mr. Limbaugh in the capital ...
Mr. Rosenberg considers himself something of an expert
on Israel, where he
has travelled extensively and spent a year as a student
at Tel Aviv
University. The summer before his graduation from
Syracuse, he worked
at the State Department, helping produce a videotape that
introduces Israel to Foreign Service Officers newly stationed in Tel
Aviv ... [Rosenberg] describes himself to acquaintances as an evangelical
Christian ... [He regards] himself as a rather committed Zionist." [BERKE, p.
1]
The economic piston
behind the Jacor feeding frenzy was Sam Zell, a Jewish
billionaire who is also the chairman and major stockholder in the company.
Zell was listed in the mid-1990s as the 96th wealthiest American by
Forbes magazine. The president of Jacor is also Jewish,
Steve Lehman, as is the CEO, Randy Michaels (real name: Benjamin Homel).
(Sheila Rosenberg was Chairperson and Robert Lawrence the co-CEO in 1996).
Michaels has long
cultivated a distinct reputation in the radio business. In the early 1990s
at a Radio & Records convention he ripped the shirt off a woman he planted
in the audience during his talk about the "importance of being outrageous."
[STARK, p. 63] Michaels, wrote the Dallas Morning News, also "has
earned publicity for promoting his stations with billboards that featured
naked women and disgraced celebrities." [DWORKIN, p. 1H]
In 1992 ABC's 20/20 TV program featured a story about a sexual
harassment suit by a former talk show host. Broadcasting magazine
noted that
"In the report, 20/20
quoted [former Jacor employees] who said that
'Jacor's emphasis on
sexually oriented programming continues off the air, creating a raunchy
workplace atmosphere that [was] ... intolerable for
some female
employees’.... The report detailed incidents in which
Michaels, then vice
president of programming and an on-air personality at
WFLA, allegedly
accosted women with a flexible rubber penis and twice
mooned a female
employee." [VILES, p. 33]
In 1996, as a
recorded radio stunt, local employees at a Jacor affiliate in Denver went to
a mosque and "played the national anthem on a bugle and taunted
worshippers." The Denver Post responded by condemning the station
attitude created by Jacor's top executives:
"The management of
radio station KPI would have us believe that the buck stops with
disc jockeys, in the outrageous invasion of Muslim mosque in Denver.
Wrong. The buck should stop at Jacor, the
corporate owner of
the station ... Jacor has demonstrated it has the financial clout and
the influence to dominate the Denver radio market
with eight
stations. But this latest incident proves that Jacor is a lousy,
money-grubbing
corporate citizen. It obviously couldn't care less about
the irresponsible,
bigoted trash it's spewing out over the public airwaves. [AMOLE, p. F5A]
In 1998 Jacor made
Denver's news again when a citizens' group -- Citizens Opposing the Stadium
Cost -- charged that Jacor's eight local stations were "openly engaged in a
campaign to shape public opinion and influence an election that would result
in substantial profits for itself as well as its political and business
allies." [LOWE, p. A10]
(Ever in flux, in
1999, with continuing corporate mergers and reshufflings, Jacor
merged with Clear Channel Communications [non-Jewish (?) CEO
Lowry Mays] to become the second largest radio group in America in terms of
stations (458). Randy Michaels was named president of Clear Channel).
In the cable world,
based in Philadelphia, the Comcast Corporation is America's
third largest cable company (only behind Time-Warner and
TCI). Comcast was founded by three Jewish
entrepreneurs in the 1960s -- Ralph Roberts, Daniel Aaron, and Julian
Brodsky. By the 1990s the company's chairman, Roberts, was worth $400
million and owned 78% of the company's voting stock. In 1997 he ceded voting
control to his son, Brian, who had been earlier named, at age 30, as the
Comcast president. By 1996, Brian was also Chairman of the
National Cable Television Association and on the Boards of Turner
Broadasting System, QVC, Inc., and Viewer's Choice. [ALMANAC, 4-23-96]

In 1991, another Jewish executive, Ann Wexler, was named as Director of the
Comcast company (she had once served as a public liaison assistant to
President Jimmy Carter. Wexler's husband is the president of American
University in Washington DC). In 1998 Howard
Fischer & Associates took credit for bringing Steve Burke (formerly
president of Disney's ABC Broadcasting) to the
presidency of Comcast as Brian Roberts moved upwards. Comcast
has been active in Jewish and Israeli causes, including a film about the
Holocaust that was introduced to local school systems. In 1993 the company
even defrayed expenses for a Jewish National Fund "gala" featuring the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell. "Having someone
of Colin Powell's stature gives us the edge," said JNF president David
Neving, "and means we'll sell more tickets to raise money for Israel."
[FEILER, p. 17]

(Brian Roberts won silver medals in squash in 1981, 1985, and 1997 at
Israel's Maccabiah Games. "The Maccabi," once noted Israeli prime minister
David Ben-Gurion about the Games, "is withouou a doubt one of the most
important offshoots of the Zionist movement." [http://www.maccabicanada.com/about/history/history.html]
According to the organization's web site, the Maccabiah Games' "Goals and
Objectives" are "1. To re-inforce Jewish Zionist Education, both for the
youth and adults to enable the Jews to receive and explore their roots. 2.
To fight Assimilation 3. To get the Jewish youth of the Diaspora more
acquainted with the Jewish heritage and tradition. 4.To foster the
relationship between the Jewish communities inter-globally and with
Israel.")
[http://www.maccabiworld.org/aboutus.html]

In 2001, Comcast took over AT&T's cable busines to become the
"giant of the industry ... with 22.3 million cable subscribers in 41 states.
The company will have more than 30 percent of the cable market ... The
Roberts [family] will have only a l percent equity stake in the combined
company. But they will control one-third of the voting stock, far more than
any other single block of voting shareholders." [DABNEY, M., 12-20-01]Further along in the
mega-mogul category, the Bronfman family (worth $2.7 billion) acquired a
fortune by supplying United States bootleggers with alcohol from Canada
during the prohibition years. Deals were made with Jewish gangster Meyer
Lansky for the illegal distribution of Bronfman's liquor into the United
States. The Bronfman's own Seagram's, and market
Chivas Regal scotch, Absolut vodka, Mumm
champagne, Martell cognac, and Tropicana fruit
juices. At the age of 16 a young heir, Edgar Bronfman,
Jr. (whose father is the Chairman of the World Jewish Congress) spent
$500,000 on making his first movie. Later, he bought 15% of the shares of
Time Warner (the parent firm of Warner Brothers,
HBO, and Time magazine.) In 1995 Edgar gained 80% of
MCA,Inc. the parent company of Universalpictures, Universal City and other theme parks in Los
Angeles and Orlando, Florida, and Geffen Records. MOMENT, p.
(By the early 1980s MCA -- run by Lew Wasserman and
Sidney Sheinberg -- had evolved from a talent agency to a television
production and music firm.) The Bronfman dynasty, as noted earlier, also
owns the PolyGram media empire. (Ever changing, Seagram
recently merged with the French Vivendi media conglomerate. In 2001,
Jewish Hollywood mogul Barry Diller took the helm of Vivendi Universal,
"one of Hollywood's hottest studios.") [VERRIER/BROWN, 12-16-01]
Some apologists have
argued that, with large investments in Hollywood by powerful Japanese
corporations in recent years, that Jewish power there is being diluted. Not
so says Michael Medved:
"It's ...
foolish to use foreign ownership of leading entertainment conglomerates as
a rebuttal to those who blame Jews for what they dislike about
Hollywood. Sure, companies like Sony [and] Mitsushita [are] not
recognizable Jewish name[s]. Nevertheless, these offshore enterprises have
functioned in Hollywood like absentee landlords,
employing
long-time industry insiders in all the most powerful positions rather
than importing their own personnel from Tokyo or
Sidney. When
Mitsushita took over MCA-Universal, for instance, the
home company did
nothing to undermine the unquestioned authority of
Universal's legendary -- and all Jewish -- management triad of Lew
Wasserman, Sid
Scheinberg, and Tom Pollack. Now, of course, the Japanese
conglomerate has abandoned its high-flying Hollywood adventure and
turned over its entertainment division to Seagram-- a business
that's owned by one of the most visible and active Jewish families on the
globe, the Bronfmans, whose patriarch heads the World
Jewish Congress.
Young Edgar Bronfman Jr. has now arrived in
California to
take personal control of the operation and has installed
Ron Meyer (former
associate of Mike Ovitz at the Creative ArtistsAgency)
as his second-in command." [Medved, p. 37]
Before Edgar
Bronfman (chairman of the World Jewish Congress) and his family's Seagrams
corporation took over MCA-Universal, there was a lingering
"Jewish problem" to Mitsushita ownership. "A sensitive matter that remains
unresolved from the Matsushita-MCA deal," noted the Los Angeles Times
in 1991, "is Matsushita's relationship with Israel. Matsushita was listed
late last year among the companies that comply with an Arab-led business
boycott of Israel. The disclosure did not threaten the deal but did express
all sides, because Wasserman is a leading supporter of Israel." [CITRON,
Matsushita, p. D1]
(Chairman of Universal in 2002? Jewish
dominance endures. Stacey Snider is also Jewish.) [DRUDGE, M., 3-8-02]

For Ovitz's part,
when Sony bought Columbia Pictures in 1988, he
bagged an $8 million "consultant" fee. When Matsushita bought
out MCA, Ovitz's consultancy brought him $40 million. [SLATER,
p. 219, 227] In 1994 an unnamed Sony executive in Tokyo told
the Japanese business weekly Keizaikai, "The United States film
business is almost completely controlled by Jews. This is true of what we
are doing as well and our job is to use them in an efficient manner."
The magazine then noted, "What this person is saying is that you
cannot ignore the Jews if you do business in the United States." [MAGIDA,
British, p. 42] (These conditions were apparently
noted by Berry Gordy, founder and head of the African-American
Motown musical recording label. A Jewish employee, Rob Cohen, was
installed as a prominent official in the company's film division).
[TARABORRELLI, p. 299]
The Japanese-owned
media giant Sony has maintained a prominent Jewish executive
presence in its American operations. In 1994, Michael Raskin, the 33-year
old chief American counsel for the Sony Corporation, fell and
died on Mt. Fuji. In a 1997 job purge because of weak profits, Sony
Corporation of America chief Michael Schulhoff and Sony
movie president Fred Bernstein lost their positions. (Alan Levine, chairman
of Sony Pictures Entertainment, had been fired the year
before). Schulhoff had earlier hired Jeff Sagansky in 1994 as his second in
command. By 1998 Sagansky was -- of all things -- the CEO of Paxson
Communications, a "conservative Christian" station. Illustrating the
necessity even here for a negotiating Jewish presence in order to reasonably
function in the Jewish entertainment and broadcast industry, the network
under his command would not be solely slanted from a Christian point of
view. As Sagansky told the Hollywood Reporter, "I'm Jewish so if that
were true [the owner of this station] certainly wouldn't have gotten me to
do this job.)" [DAVIES, J.] In 1999, still head of Paxson,
Sagansky was honored with the Jewish Television Network's
"Vision Award." Sagansky was also a member of JTN's Board of
Directors. [PR NEWSWIRE, 9-9-99]
By 1996 Marvin
Schick complained that
"There may be
someone adept in cyberspace who can roam across the Internet and
ascertain how often Michael Schulhoff and Mel Iberman have been enshrined
as outstanding Jews. They're the top American
officials of
Sony, the company that has just released Michael Jackson's
album which
contains words so vile and anti-Semitic that it is impossible
to figure out what
was on anyone's mind." [SCHICK, p. 5]
*************************************************
Jewish mass media
influence, internationally, in a variety of countries, is also profound.
Jews, for instance, have been prominent in defining the world
throughout Latin America from the media helms. In Brazil, Jewish
media mogul Silvio Santos (original name: Senor Abranavel) controls 98% of
the group shares of that country's second largest TV network --
Sistema Brasileirode Televisao (SBT), a
conglomerate of 33 companies employing 15,000 people. Santos long ago
installed himself as an on-air entertainer, and is a well-known TV
personality. The (London) Daily Telegraph notes that Santos is "best
known as the beaming millionaire host of Brazil's most popular television
variety show ... [which features] half-naked Samba dancing girls, celebrity
guests, and [a] Treasure Chest of Happiness lottery [that is] part of very
working-class Brazilian's traditional Sunday." [HARGREAVES, p. 21]
By 1991, Santos was
also the on-air host of the popular "They'll Do Anything for Money" show.
The Associated Press described the show:
"'How about it,
Christianne?' Santos coaxed. 'I'll give you 10,000
cruzeiros (about
$10) if you let me mash this egg on your head.' Maciel, 18, an
unemployed maid, refused. 'How about 20,000?' said Santos. 'No? How
about 40,000!' She studied the audience, then
nodded, embarrassed
... The program, which pays audience members money to be the butt
of pranks, has touched off a ratings battle that has
all Brazilian
networks thinking up new ways to ridicule contestants. The
new crop of shows
has also sparked a debate over what's funny and
what's simply
cruel." [LEWAN, AP, INTERNET]
Another SBT
show was "Get It Right or Get Splattered, in which contestants who give
wrong answers to trivia questions get a pie in the face. Now, other networks
have joined in the trend." [LEWAN, AP] In 1989, Santos
even sought to run for the presidency of Brazil. It was no joke; as the
(London) Daily Telegraph noted in a headline: "Game-show Host Could
Win Brazil's Presidency." [HARGREAVES, p. 21]
Also in Brazil, the
New York Times noted in 1982 that Jewish mogul Adolpho Bloch "has built
one of Latin America's largest communication empires," [HOGE, W., p. A1]
including Manchete and Fatose Fotos, "two of Brazil's largest
magazines." [GREENBERG, M., p. 53] Bloch, noted Judith
Elkin in 1998, also owns a total of "25 magazines, 6 radio stations, and a
television network." [ELKIN, 1998, p. 96]
In Peru, preeminent
media mogul Baruch Ivcher is an immigrant from Israel and owns the country's
largest television station. In 1997, during political
troubles with the government for a series of television exposes, Ivcher
lived in Miami and Israel. His minority partners in the station, also
Jewish, ran the company in his stead. [FORWARD, 11-7-97, p. 3]
In Panama, the largest newspaper, La Prensa, is owned by
Jewish mogul Robert Eisenmann. Even in Jamaica, that
country's most prominent newspaper -- the Gleaner -- is most publicly
associated with the Ashenheim family. [HOLZBERG, p. 146]
In Bolivia, a country that had less than 500 Jews in the whole country in
1987, "publisher and book dealer Werner Guttentag [is] a major presence on
the national cultural scene." [ELKIN, 1998, p. 127]
In Mexico, the
principal news anchorman for Televista (which in recent years
has held a monopolistic 95 per cent of the television audience) was Jacobo
Zabludovsky. [OPPENHEIMER, A., p. 128, 131] He retired in 1998 after 27
years. Zabludovsky is often referred to as the "Walter
Cronkite of Mexico." He was "the nation's most influential journalist who
was also director of the network's news division for many years." [BUCKLEY,
T.] Zabludovsky's son, Abraham, is also a prominent
reporter at the TV network.

In 2001 Jewish author Elissa Rashkin wrote a book entitled Women
Filmmakers in Mexico. Of the five filmmakers she features, at least two
are Jewish (despite the fact that there are merely 86,000 Jews in all of
Mexico). Such filmmakers reflect typical Jewish themes. For Guita Schyfter,

"with government backing, she was able to make a film which directly
addressed
her own experience of outsiderness and exclusion, as well as the
history of Mexican
Jews as a whole. That Schyfter's reexamination of mexicanidad
through Jewish eyes
came to the screen in the 1990s has everything to do with larger
changes taking place
during this period: the collapse of myths of national unity in the
wake of successive
economic and political crises and the emergence of contestatory
discourses such
as feminism, gay activism, and campesino and indigenous
resistance to centralized
state power ... Schyfter was refused permission by the president of
the Ashkenazi
community to film at the old synagogue and the Jewish cemetery, on the
grounds
that the film included an intermarriage." [RASHIN, E., 2001, p. 143,
153]

For Dana Rotberg's film Angel de fuego, "Rotberg has commented
extensively on the influence of her Jewish upbringing on the film."
[RASHKIN, E., 2001, p. 199] Jewish male Mexican filmmakers and film critics
alluded to in Rashkin's discussion of female Mexican filmmakers include
Arturo Ripstein, Gabriel Retes, Ramirez Berg, and Mauricio Wallerstein.

Then there was Jacques and Natasha Gelman, Jewish immigrants from
Eastern Europe, who settled in Mexico. They were

"major players in the glamorous Mexico City film scene of the 1940s
... Aristocratically
educated in St. Petersburg, Russia, Jacques Gelman had been sent
packing
to Europe by his land-owning parents following the 1917 Bolshevik
Revolution,
his pockets stuffed with several Faberge eggs he luckily was never
forced to sell.
Much of his fortune ... came from discovering and producing the films
of
Mexican comedian Cantiflas." [VANESIAN, K., 6-7-01]Elsewhere in Latin
America, Jaime Yankelevich "pioneered both radio and television and
broadcasting in Argentina, becoming a nationally known figure in the
country's culture and politics ...[ELKIN, 1998, p. 157]
... Max Glucksman (1875-1946) was producing, distributing, and exhibiting
films in the early years of this century. Albeto Soifer ... wrote tangos and
other music for more than eighty movies. Leon Klimovsky ... directed movies,
and Luis Saslavsky wrote screenplays for Argentine and foreign films.
Numerous Jewish actors and actresses, such as the Singerman sisters and Iza
Kremer, gained fame." [ELKIN, 1998, p. 101]
"Many Jewish
immigrants [to Argentina]," notes Judith Elkin,
"turned to
journalism as a profession, and a considerable number of them founded
their own journals of opinion. The total number
of periodicals
emanating from identifiably Jewish sources that have circulated in Buenos
Aires at one time or another probably comes
to as many as 250.
With the acculturation of the second generation
and attrition of the
communal press, journalists who are Jewish
emerged into the
wider, multimedia, Spanish-and-Portugese world.
Bernardo Verbitsky
of El Mundo, Antonio Portnoy of La Gaceta
and others
introduced a substantial presence of journalists into the
Argentine press ...
The current president of Argentine PEN is a Jew,
and so is the first
Latin American to be elected president of the
Federation of
International Association of Journalists ... Jews were
among the pioneers
of Argentine films ... and a host of other entertainers achieved fame on the
Argentine radio and stage despite their 'exotic'
origins ... Actors
occupy several pages in recent books about Jewish
Argentina and
Mexico." [ELKIN, 1998, p. 276]
The most famous
Jewish Argentinean media figure in the West was probably Jacobo Timerman,
founder of Primera Plana ("a kind of Argentina Time"),
[SACHAR, H., 1985, p. 305] and founder, publisher and editor of the
newspaper La Opinion. [SIMPSON/BENNETT, 1985, p. 245] "Broadly
speaking, La Opinion supported [in the 1970s] much of the military
government's disastrous economic policy," note John Simpson and Jana
Bennett, "and it rarely spoke in unambiguous terms about the government's
total disregard of human rights, or the continuing practice of torture and
murder. What it did was to highlight some of the cases that came to light,
and that was itself dangerous enough." [SIMPSON/BENNETT, p. 247] In 1977
Timerman was arrested, initially during an investigation into Timerman's
partner at La Opinion (a 45% shareholder in the paper), banker David
Gravier. Gravier had recently died in a plane crash, and soon thereafter his
banking interests in Belgium, Switzerland and the United States crashed,
causing a scandal. It was also discovered that Gravier, also Jewish, "had
been handling $17 million, mainly raised through robberies and ransom
demands by the Montonero guerillas." [SIMPSON/BENNETT, p. 252] As for
Timerman, note Simpson and Bennett, "[he] had a reputation as a king-maker
and wheeler-dealer which made the human rights side of his case [in
Argentina] more difficult to get across." [SIMPSON/BENNETT, p. 259]
Timerman was
imprisoned, interrogated and tortured by interrogators of the ruling
military junta, not uncommon in an era when over 11,000 people in Argentina
"disappeared," presumed murdered by the oppressive dictatorship.
Timerman, in his
best-selling book, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number,
recalls an early interrogation he was forced to undergo with his captors:
"Question:
Are you Jewish?
Answer:
Yes.
Question:
Are you a Zionist?
Answer:
Yes.
Question:
Is La Opinion Zionist?
Answer:
La Opinion supports Zionism since it is the liberation
movement of the Jewish people. It considers Zionism
to be
a movement of high positive values, the study of
which
can shed light on many problems related to building
national Argentine unity. Question:
Then it is a Zionist newspaper? Answer:
If you wish to put it in those terms, yes. Question:
Do you travel to Israel often?
Answer:
Yes.
Question:
Do you know the Israeli ambassador?
Answer:
Yes."
[TIMERMAN, J.,
1981, p. 30]
Timmerman survived a
two and a half-year imprisonment and, due to international pressure upon the
Argentine government in his behalf, was released. He was expelled from
Argentina and subsequently emigrated to Israel.
Also in Argentina,
Alef, "the world's first Jewish TV channel outside of Israel,"
was initiated in 1995. Vice president Horacio Lutzky, said
Television Business International "will have a Jewish perspective, but
is looking for a universal audience." Transmitting 24 hours a day, the
network was founded and funded by "15 Argentine investors and local and
Israeli media professionals." Two-thirds of the programming was to come from
Israel. "Also under way are negotiations with cable operators in other Latin
American countries." [TEL. BUS. INT'L, p. 16]
Along the same lines,
in Great Britain, the (London) Independent wrote in 1998 that:
"Britain's Jews are
being urged to seize the unique opportunity presented
by the digital
revolution to create their own television channel. The call came yesterday from
the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR), a leading
international think-tank, and is being backed by prominent Jews
who hold some of
the most powerful posts in British broadcasting,
including David
Elstein, chief executive of Channel 5, Michael Green,
chairman of
Carleton Communications, and Sir Jeremy Isaacs, founding chief
executive of Channel4. His successor Michael
Grade
was also Jewish.
Indeed, until he quit television last year, all of Britain's
five terrestrial
channels had Jews in prominent positions." [BROWN, p.
11]
One of the forces
behind the new Jewish channel, professor Roger Silverstone, said that "it is
high time that Jews participate in electronic media space to recover their
heritage, to redefine their identity, and their social and cultural
contribution, and to make their presence felt in the wider public sphere."
[BROWN, p. 11] "Professor Silverstone," noted the
Independent, "acknowledged the risk of creating an 'electronic ghetto'
through such a narrow casting initiative. But he envisaged that the proposed
channel would avoid the danger by appealing from day one to non-Jews."
[BROWN, p.11]
Also in England, in
the 1980s, the head of Channel 4 in London, Jeremy Isaacs, was
Jewish. [LILENTHAL, p. 143] A former chairman of the
BBC, Stuart Young, was also chair of the Institute for Jewish
Affairs. By the late 1970s, another British Jew, Sir James Goldsmith, owned
the weekly French newspaper L'Express as well as a significant
interest in London's Daily Express. [MCCLINTICK, p. 303]
David Montagu was director of London Weekend Television for 21
years, as well as the chairman and CEO of OrionBank.
Sidney Samuelson has been "head of the British Film Commission since
1991." [SINGER/SELDIN, 1997, p. 267] "At least three British television
stations and a radio station are headed by [Jews]," noted (London)
Independent journalist Mark Lawson in 1994, "as, in the past, were three
of the great ITV companies: ATV,Granada,
and the Thames." [LAWSON, p. 16]
Alex Bernstein, for example, is the former chairman of
Granada Television till he retired in 1979; his father, Sidney, founded
the company by first building a chain of cinemas, opening one a week in
1935. "Raised in an Orthodox Jewish home," noted the Associated Press,
"Bernstein was not particularly religious. But he was a lifelong supporter
of many Israeli charities." [AP, 2-6-93] Another Jewish mogul, David
Goldman, is the former chairman of Britain's Sage computer
software group.
In the mid-1990s, the
Internet website of European-based Radio Islam (considered to be extremely
anti-Semitic by Jewish organizations) documented over 250 names of prominent
Jews on staff in England's mass media system, ranging from Alan Yentob
(Director of BBC programming) to Judee Goffee (Director of the
Independent Television Commission) to David Elstein (the CEO of
Channel 5) to Duncan Lewis (the CEO of the Granada
Media Group) to Julian Aston (the Managing Director of Channel
1), and on and on and on.
In 1999,
Granada Media announced an agreement with the New York Times to
"jointly produce international television programming. Granada,
one of Europe's largest commercial television production companies, and a
unit of London based Granada Group PLC, said it will have
access to the New York Times' newsroom and other departments, in
order to create documentary programming, including science, history, and
current affairs shows." [WALL STREET JOURNAL, p. 3]
In 1998, Scotland's
The Scotsman wondered:
"Vanni who? TV-land
was desperately seeking the answer to that question this week after it
was announced that Vanni Treves ["of Jewish stock"], a
57-year old lawyer,
had been named as the new chairman of Channel 4
television."
[DIDCOCK, p. 31]
In 1991, the
(London) Sunday Telegraph noted the path to power of Jewish media
mogul Michael Green:
"In his own quest to
own a television franchise, Green has immersed
himself in the
industry, becoming close friends with men such as [Jewish
media moguls] Michael
Grade of Channel 4 and Alan Yentob of BBC2... The jewel of the
ITV [television network was] added to his crown... Green attended Great
Portland Street synagogue where he met Isaac (later Lord) Wolfson, the
founder of Great Universal Stores and one of the most influential
businessmen of his generation.... Helped mainly by
[Jewish] city advisor
Michael Sorkin of HambrosBank, Green built [his]
company ... into a
near $2 billion communications giant ... [Green] is
great friends with
[Jewish moguls] Lord Rothschild, Charles Saatchi, Gerald Ratner, and
media bigwigs Grade and Yentob ... Green cherishes a collection of cars
including a 14-year old Rolls-Royce convertible, a Bentley Turbo, and an
Austin Martin Virage." [SUNDAY TELEGRAPH,
p. 23]
In 1995, seven of the
ten most popular television drama shows in Great Britain were produced by
Green's Carleton UK Television. [LAING, p.
15] The Daily Telegraph called him "the most
powerful figure in British commercial television." [VALLELY, p. 21]
(In 1998 the Carlton Communications division was fined
$3.2 million by a British TV commission "for faking an award-winning
documentary about Colombian drug smuggling." [USA TODAY, 12-22-98]) In 1998,
British Jewish media mogul Stephen Grabiner (whose brother Mike runs
Energis, a telecommunications company) was "the front man for
the biggest media launch this country has ever seen" [LYNN, INTERNET]
-- British Digital Broadcasting (BDB), a
joint venture between Michael Green's Carlton company and
Granada. These two corporations, note the Wall Street
Journal, "are the two largest players in ITV, "which is
Britain's leading commercial terrestrial [i.e., non-digital/satellite]
channel." [PYLAS, p. 14] Grabiner also headed the newspaper and magazine
division of United News and Media. By 1998
too, BBC's studios were, quite literally, rented out to a
Jewish bar mitzvah ceremony. "More normally home to A Question of Sport and
the Mrs. Merton Show," noted the London Independent, "Studio A will
now be made kosher so that food can be served to a party of several
hundred." [MCCANN, p. 10]
By the late 1990s,
more and more British observers were expressing concern about the increased
decadence on British broadcasting airwaves. "The tidal wave of sex and
nudity," complained journalist Leo McKinsty, "demonstrates that the BBC and
other broadcasters have lost all sense of morality ... A friend of mine was
recently trying to make a programme for the supposedly religious Everyman
slot on BBC 1 about Edith Stein, the Jew who converted to Christianity, died
in a concentration camp and has recently been canonized. He was told the
subject was 'not sexy enough.'" [MCKINSTY, L., 11-23-98] Government Culture
Secretary Chris Smith even told the House of Commons that "We have noted in
recent days a very considerable concern about some of the content on
television, particularly in relation to Channel 5." [LEVY, G.,
6-22-2000, p. 19]
Channel 5
is of course headed by Jewish mogul David Elstein, and he increasingly has
come under attack for the station's fare. "Can this really be the same man,"
wondered the Daily Mail,
"who today runs a
channel that seeps tat into our living rooms with
offerings such as
Stark Naked, a naturism programme screened at
8:30 PM; Pleasure
Zone, the theme of which is sex, debauched films masquerading as
drama; The Naughty, Naughty Hypno Show, in which members of the
audience are hypnotised to engage in lewd acts such as simulating oral sex
and wearing a rubber phallus; and, of course, the gruesome show Naked
Jungle in which all the contestants appear in the nude." [BROWN,
A., 11-2-97]
"Much of this
[television decadence]," noted the London Daily Mail in another
article the next year, "can be traced back to the zeal with which [Jewish
media mogul] Michael 'Pornographer-in-Chief' Grade introduced a whole new
approach when in charge of Channel 4, filling its outposts with
sex-oriented programs." [MCKINSTY, L., 11-23-98] Other Jewish moguls include
David and Ralph Gold,

"[who are] most famous for owning the Ann Summers chain of sex shops,
run
run by David's daughter Jacqueline. The Gold brothers have interests in
top shelf publishing as well as owning independent magazine distributor
Portman. The brothers also jointly own Sport Newspapers
and Birmingham
City football club with David Sullivan." [TMF NEWS] Elsewhere in Britain,
the avidly pro-Israel Hollinger Group ("described by one author
in 1997 as "the world's fastest growing press empire"
[NESIVSKY, p. 1]) is the owner of London's Daily Telegraph, the
Jerusalem Post and is the owner -- or has an interest in
-- nearly 500 newspapers throughout the world. It controls half of
all the daily newspapers in Canada and even owns 24% of Australia's
second-largest newspaper chain, Fairfax Holdings. The man who
runs all this from England, Conrad Black, is not Jewish, but, noted the
(London) Sunday Times, "he thought nothing of turning the whole
traditional editorial policy of the Jerusalem Post on its head once
he acquired it, transforming it from a dovish into a hawkish [militantly
pro-Israel, anti-Arab] paper overnight." [HOWARD,
INTERNET]
The Jerusalem Post
itself noted that:
"For the record,
Black has long had Jews on his company boards, including such
figures as Chaim Herzog [a former president of Israel],
Henry Kissinger, the
Canadian real-estate tycoon Paul Reichmann, former
Canadian ambassador
to the U.S. Allan Gottleib, U.S. security advisor
Richard Perle, Peter
Bronfman, Sir Zelman Cowen, and others. Black's current wife, the
one-time Sunday Times of London columnist Barbara Amiel, is Jewish, and
Black's longtime Jewish partner David Radler
became the Post's
chairman." [NESIVSKY, p. 22]
The (London)
Sunday Times noted that Black's "wife, chief operating officer, and
other key members of staff, including the Fairfax chairman [in
Australia], are Jewish." [BERNOTH] Black's wife, Barbara
Amiel, is also a director of the Spectator, the Jerusalem Post,
and Sunday Night Magazines. For years she
has been the senior political columnist for the Sunday Times
(London). "Those of us who care about Israel," wrote
Amiel in 1999, "can't come up with any pragmatic reason for our unrequited
love ... I'd support Israel even if I were not a Jew, simply because any
country that is subject to such malevolent distortion fits my notion of a
worthy underdog." [AMIEL, 1999, p. 17] In 1995, Conrad Black and his wife
were guests of honor at the Jerusalem Foundation of Canada.
"Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel, a columnist for MacLean's
and the Daily Telegraph," observed MacLean's itself in 1997,
"are known for their hawkish positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
[NOLEN, p. 36]
Black's Jewish
partner, David Radler, is also the CEO of Hollinger (Blacks'
Canadian holding company) and he is the chairman of the Chicago Sun-Times.
He is also on the board of the UK Telegraph newspaper and
Southam (Canada's biggest newspaper chain). [SIMON, p. 16]
Radler was described by the Financial Times (London) as
"Black's closest business confidant, his chief deal maker, and when
necessary, his hatchet man." [SIMON, p. 16]
[Also note earlier
references to Jewish domination of the nineteenth century British newspaper
world]

In 2001, Black announced plans to within the year launch a new daily
newspaper called the New York Sun. Jewish hedge-fund mogul Michael
Steinhardt was a major co-investor. The chief editors at the new paper were
announced as Seth Lipsky, former editor of the Jewish ethnic weekly
newspaper, Forward, and his 'protege,' Ira Stoll. [New York Observer,
11-29-01]Earlier, in 1991, at
the death of corrupt [see earlier] British tycoon Robert Maxwell (born
Ludvik Hoch), his media empire included Britain's Mirror Group
of newspapers, including the Daily Mirror and SundayMirror.
Other media holdings included People, Syndication International,
the Scottish Daily Record, the New York Daily News, 50% of
Germany's Berliner Zeitung, 50.1% of Hungary's Maygar Hirlap,
45% of the Kenya News, the European newspaper, percentages of
Canadian media companies, Metromode cable TV, MacMillan,
MacMillan-McGraw Hill Educational Books, Pergamon, Que
(computer books), Collier, Panini, Berlitz, the
Official Airlines Guide, and Europe's biggest printing company.
Maxwell also owned a major share of Ma’ariv, one of Israel's two
major newspapers. The Jewish Advocate noted that Maxwell "has been
called the 'crook of the century' following revelations that he looted $900
million from his workers' pension funds and his complicated web of
companies. Hour by hour, new and lurid details surface of Maxwell's
chicanery, deceit, and international intrigue." Yet, said the Advocate,
in its article entitled Robert Maxwell: An Appreciation, "Maxwell was
an ardent Zionist devoted to Israel and the Jewish people ... Despite all
the National Equirer glamour and clamor, beneath the swashbuckling image of
'Cap'n Bob,' beat the heart of a real mensch, a decent, sensitive man, a
Holocaust survivor." [PORTER, p. 9]
In 1986 Ari
Ben-Menashe, a controversial figure who asserted an identity as an Israeli
undercover agent and arms dealer, claimed that he had dealt directly with
Maxwell as a "sayan" (Jewish "assistant" for the Mossad) in
soliciting his help for an Israeli coverup, to impugn actual photographs
taken inside Israel's nuclear weapons plant by defector Mordechai Vanunu as
fraudulent. As Seymour Hersh tells it:
"Maxwell made it
clear at the brief session, Ben-Menashe recalled,
that he
understood what had to be done about the Vanunu story. 'I
know what has to
happen,' Maxwell told Ben-Menashe. 'I have
already spoken to
your bosses.'" [HERSH, p. 312]
Whether this
interchange was true or not (some have challenged Ben-Menashe's
credibility), Maxwell's Daily Mirror printed Vanunu's true story as
"a hoax or something even more sinister -- a plot to discredit Israel."
[BOWER, p. 462] Maxwell, a British citizen, notes
Seymour Hersh, "was well known for his closeness to Israel's top
leadership," and even ordered that the Vanunu photographs be delivered to
the Israeli embassy. [HERSH, p. 312] Maxwell's funeral in Jerusalem was
attended by the most powerful Israeli government officials, including prime
minister Yitzhak Shamir, and cabinet ministers Ariel Sharon, Moshe Arens,
Ehud Olmert, and Shimon Peres. President Chaim Herzog
was among Maxwell's eulogizers, noting his rise as a media mogul, thus
"influencing a large sector of mankind in many countries." [LYNFIELD, p. 7]
"Regaled at his graveside by the Israeli government as a hero," notes Tom
Bower, "he was condemned in London as a fraud." [BOWER, p. xiv]
Maxwell's lawyer in Israel, Yaacov Ne'eman, eventually became the
Israeli Finance Minister under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. [MACHLIS,
p. 30] In 1995 Maxwell's widow was selected by the American Zionist Youth
Federation to be the Grand Marshall for New York's Salute to Israel parade.
Maxwell's intrigues
were diverse. Nicholas Davies, the former Foreign Editor at Maxwell's
Daily Mirror, notes that "for decades Maxwell had been involved with the
KGB, not, as far as is known, as an active agent or in spying activities,
but according to KGB sources in Moscow, he acted as a conduit, a banker,
'laundering' the KGB's money outside the Soviet Union." [DAVIES, N., p. 7]
Another Jewish
entertainment/media mogul in Britain over the last few decades has been Lew
Grade (born Louis Winogradsky). Grade founded the Associated
TelevisionCorporation (ATV) and was the
Managing Director of ACC (Associated Communications
Corporation), which owned ATV. Grade built the largest
chain of theatres in the world. His brother, Bernard Delfont (born Boris
Winogradsky), became the CEO of EMI's entertainment division
and a nephew, Michael Grade, became Director of Programming for the
BBC as well as the CEO of Channel 4 and the director of
FirstLeisure. By the 1960s,
notes Michael Pye, "the Grades were the most powerful force in British show
business, the three brothers [Lew, Leslie, and Bernard Delfont at their
company called the Grade Organization] had television in the
Midlands, a string of London theatres, and a vast agency business." [PYE, p.
234] In 1980, music critic David Harker noted the omnipresence of the
powerful Winogradsky brothers in British music, media, and entertainment
worlds:
"The
Royal Variety show takes place in a theatre owned by
AssociatedTelevision (ATV), which is run by
Lew Grade -- who,
just happens, to
be Bernard Delfont's brother. The proceeds from the
shows go to a
charity -- presided over by Bernard Delfont. Delfont is
also a director
of EMI, the largest record manufacturer in the world.
Recently,
EMI absorbed one of England's two big cinema circuits --
Associated British Pictures -- of which Delfont is also a director.
Bernard Delfont
is also deputy chairman and joint managing director of
the
GradeOrganization, which is owned by EMI (of
which Mr.
Delfont is a
director). Bernard Delfont thus owns himself -- twice. So,
if you read the
TV Times, buy Pye, Marble Arch,
Regal,
Columbia,
Parlophone, HMV, Pathe,
Music for Pleasure, or
Odeon
Records; if you watch ATV or Thames Televisions,
go to
the Talk
of the Town, the London Palladium, Victoria Palace,
Hippodrome, Her Majesty's Globe, Lyric,
Apollo, or Prince of
Wales
Theatres; if you go to one of
ABC's 270 cinemas or twelve bowling alleys or
one of Ambassador's ten bowling alleys, then Bernard Delfont
has an interest in what you're doing." [WICKE, p. 120]
Delfont and London
music publisher Cyril Share were particularly active in support of Israel
during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. [COLEMAN, p. 345]
Jewish commentator
Barnet Litvinoff once observed
"that Jewish
power expressed unconsciously is Jewish power
nevertheless.
Few films emanating from Hollywood have put a Jew in
an unfavourable
light, possibly because of the special character the
industry assumed
through the Jewish pioneers who controlled it for
so long. Britain
may well be undergoing a similar experience through
the ubiquity of
the organization headed by Lew Grade and his brothers
(the erstwhile
Winogradskys of Whitechapel). It is impregnable in
entertainment
for its hold upon the theatre, the variety scene,
commercial
television, a significantly large cinema circuit, and its contractual ties
with many leading actors, writers, and popular
musicians."
[LITVINOFF, B., p. 168]
Lew Grade, note Peter
Brown and Steven Gaines,
"owned the huge
Associated Television Corporation, Britain's
largest independent
producer of TV programs. Lew Grade also personally produced
the United Kingdom's most popular TV
variety show,
'Sunday Night at the Palladium,' on which an appearance was crucial for an
act to gain national attention. Brother Leslie Grade headed the largest
show business agency in the country ... The third brother, Bernard,
owned several prestigious theatres, was a major force behind the
West End Theatre business, and by appointment to the Queen booked the
most prestigious of all live shows, the Royal Command
Performance." [BROWN/GAINES, 1983, p. 98]

(Among Grade's many Jewish partners in various reams was Leo
Greenfield, "nearly legendary in the field of motion picture distribution,"
who co-founded with the British mogul the film distribution firm Associated
Film Distribution.) [BROUWER/WRIGHT, 1990, p. 508-509]Another British
Jewish entertainment mogul, Louis Benjamin, was the managing director of the
Moss Empire, a theatre chain later running the Pye
and Golden Guinea record labels. Benjamin "pioneered cut-price
records..., signed many of the musical giants of the day, and was credited
with the introduction of Rhythm and Blues to the [British] public." [DAILY
TELEGRAPH, p. 21] Arnold Goodman, who died in 1999, was chairman of
British Lion Films and the London Observer newspaper. [FINANCIAL
TIMES, 10-16-99, p. 4] Jack Shulman "started one of London's early silent
movie picture houses despite being a staunch member of the communist party."
[BEVAN, J., 10-2-94, p. 24]
Echoing the situation
in America, many of Great Britain's popular comics have been Jewish. These
include Peter Sellers, Marty Feldman, Bennett Aron, David Baddiel, Jerry
Sadowtiz, Paul Kaye, David Schneider, Sid James, Ivor Dembina, Arnold Brown,
Alexei Sayle, Ben Elton, Peter Rosengard, Maureen Lipman, and Mark Maier.
Television writers Laurence Marks and Maurice Green are recent history's
"Kings of British Sitcom." [WINNER, D., p. 45] Then there is Esther Rantzen,
also Jewish. As London's Independent reported in 1991:

"Her colleagues and the Press delight in castigating her. She has been
called vulgar, mawkish, exploitative, smug and self- serving;
ruthless, spiteful, ambitious,
aggressive, power-mad. In the Eighties she was frequently likened to
Mrs.
Thatcher, a comparison she claimed she was proud to accept, adding
however
that Mrs T identified with success and she with victims. After winning
this week's
libel case against a newspaper that claimed she had protected a known
paedophile
because he provided inside information for her programme, she said her
critics
had the right to call her old, ugly and untalented, 'but if you tell
me that I put
children in danger, then I have to go to court.' Few would dispute
that Esther
Rantzen is the most powerful woman on television. That alone explains
why
her survival and the 18-year reign of her programme, That's Life,
should arouse
strong passions. How did she reach and maintain that eminence?"
[INDEPENDENT,
12-21-91, p. 14]
In France, notes
Howard Sachar, "by the mid-1950s ... as in other Western nations, Jews were
prominent in theatre and cinema." [SACHAR, H., 1985, p. 99] The CEO (1996)
of Lagardere Groupe is Raymond Levy. Its Hachette
Filipacchi division publishes over 100 newspapers and magazines
(including Women's Day, Family Life, Video, and Car
and Driver) in 15 languages throughout the world. In 1995,
Lagarde bought Premiere magazine, in association with Jewish
American mogul Ronald Perelman. Its Matra division even
produces missile parts, satellite technology, and builds cars with
Renault. [HOOVER, p. 110] Also in France, Europe's largest pay-TV
organization is Canal Plus; its CEO is Marc Andre Feffer. Also,
in the 1980s and 90s, for thirteen years, Ann Sinclair, the Jewish wife of
French Finance and Industry Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn, "hosted
France's most popular political chit-chat show on prime television, being
voted 'television's personality of the year.'" [ECONOMIST, 9-13-97]
Going to France's
Cannes Film Festival? It is monopolized by yet another Jewish
entrepreneur, Gilles Jacob. Newsweek noted him in 1999 as a "career
maker," a "former film critic who has been running the Festival for the past
21 years. Not only does Jacob choose and schedule all the films, he also
picks the jury president and its members." [THAMES, D., p. 56]
Want to speak freely about the Jewish influence in radio and
television in France? In 2000, a French publisher, Editions Fayard,
called back its volume "Journal," by Renard Camus, for fear of public
backlash for Camus' negative comments about Jews in the French mass media.
The book criticized the "large presence of Jews in a radio and television
program, France Culture." Camus wrote that Jews were "over represented as an
ethnic and religious group" and there was too much emphasis on "Jewish
culture, Jewish religion, Jewish writers, the state of Israel and its
policy, the life of Jews in France, and in the world today or through the
centuries." Among those threatening to sue both the author and publisher was
the Jewish director of the France Culture program, Laure Adler. [XINHUA
GENERAL NEWS SERVICES, 4-20-2000]
In southern Europe,
Jewish mogul Carlo De Beneditti is "one of the richest men in Italy," and is
"ranked third among Italy's economic barons." He built to power
Olivetti, "one of Europe's premier computer and telecommunications
companies." A De Benedetti holding company, CIR, owns La
Repubblica, "one of the country's top newspapers," and the
Editrice Periodici Culturali magazine group, which includes
L'Espresso, a well-known weekly magazine. In 1992, De Benedetti was
sentenced to six years for fraud in a bank scandal. He was also arrested for
spending $6 million in a kickback scheme with government officials.
[MONTALBANO, p. A13; VULLIAMY, p. 9] Also in Italy, Ever Haggiag, is "a
leading Italian motion picture producer and distributor." [PERRY, V.,
6-10-99] In 1996, Fiamma Nirenstein, a "well-known journalist and former
director of the Italian Culture Center in Israel," won Italy's Premiolini
Journalism Award. [SINGER/SELDIN, 1997, p. 328] In 1999,
"Clemente J. Mimun, director of TV news at the state-run RAI-2 channel,
received the Golden Quill award honoring outstanding personalities in the
field of 'Culture in Journalism.'" [GRUBER, R., 1999, p. 333]

In 2000, Gad Lerner, also Jewish, resigned his position as director of
news on Italian state television RAI 1. "He resigned," noted the Irish
Times,

"because he had been caught up in a major political row prompted by
the fact
that his channel (as well as RAI's channel 3) had last week broadcast
disturbing
images of paedophile pornography. The controversial images had been
broadcast
within the ambit of a report on an investigation by state prosecutors
in Torre
Annunziata, near Naples, which uncovered an Italo-Russian racket that
produced
and sold child pornography on the Internet. The images in question
were deeply
disturbing since, among other things, they showed the apparent rape of
a young
boy by an adult man. Clearly, this was hardly family viewing for the
main evening
news bulletin on the nation's longest-established television service,
a bulletin that
last Wednesday night was watched by seven million people. Within
minutes, the
RAI switchboard was receiving hundreds of protest calls ... Given Mr
Lerner's
swashbuckling, campaigning style of journalism on previous news and
current
affairs programmes, it was hardly surprising to discover that he had
made enemies.
Nor did it help his popularity on the right that he is a former member
of the extreme
left-wing group, Lotta Continua." [AGNEW, P., 10-4-00, p. 14]

The Associated Press noted that "Aldo Grasso, one of Italy's
most respected television critics, said the RAI broadcasts were 'symptomatic
of what has been happening in Italian TV, both state and private, over the
last couple of years.' 'Editors are driven not by quality or responsibility
toward viewers but only the ratings,' he told the Associated Press.
'Disturbing and violent images intrude in all kinds of programs, throughout
the day.' The UNICEF head in Italy, Giovanni Micali, also complained
bitterly about rising violence. 'It was an extreme case, but not the first
and not the only one,' he said of the RAI newscasts." [HUGHES, C., 9-28-00]In 1994, in Germany,
the head of CCC Film Studio, Arthur Brauner,won
the German Federal Cross of Merit. [SINGER/SELDIN, 1995, p. 323] Leo Katcher
noted in 1968 that
"The German
motion-picture industry, which Hitler and Goebbels had converted into a
propaganda machine was a shambles when
the war ended ... For
a short time there was no industry at all and then Arthur Brauner
emerged as the new titan in the field." [KATCHER, L., 1968, p. 176]
Brauner, who is from
Poland, rose to power in post-war West Germany, where Jews were
one-twentieth of one percent of the total population. And as he once noted:
"I made up my mind
that some day I would tell the world what it
was like to be a Jew.
It was then that I decided that I would make motion pictures ... I
wanted revenge against the Germans. I wanted
to show that they had
not destroyed all Jews [KATCHER, L. 1968, p. 177] ... No Jews
can be Germans. If we have a home, it is Israel. That is where out
duty lies. That is where our love must go. It is our obligation to
defend and aid Israel." [KATCHER, p. 175]

In 1997, Brauner premiered his eighteenth film about the Holocaust (From
Hell to Hell) at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. The film's
depiction of Poles and Poland garnered protests from the Polish-American
community. A month later Brauner's German studios burned down in what police
called an arson attack. [TUGEND, T., 2-7-97]In 1995, another
Jewish mogul, Ron Sommer, took over as CEO of Deutsche Telekom,
formerly a massive state bureaucracy. Subdivisions of this firm include
T-Online, "Europe's largest internet service company." [BENOIT,
B., 9-22-2000, p. 32] Sommer was born in Haifa, Israel.
In Sweden, notes
Rochelle Wright, "Between 1989 and 1993 ... there were five Swedish feature
films and one co-production- -- a significant number, given the relatively
small annual output of the Swedish film industry -- that focused on the
Jewish experience. Beginning in 1997, several television dramas of varying
lengths also incorporated a discussion of Jewish identity or of Swedish
anti-Semitism." [WRIGHT, R., p. 8]
What about the mass
media situation in Canada (aside from the already mentioned
Hollinger dynasty)? "Jews," notes Morton Weinfeld,
"have been statistically over represented in both the financial and the
creative aspects of the entertainment business. It is a short step from that
observation to the vicious canard that the Jews, in some collective,
conspiratorial sense, control Hollywood. One could also possibly construct a
similar argument for the Canadian scene. People such as Izzy Asper, Garth
Drabinsky, Harold Greenberg, Robert Lantos, Ed Mirvish, and Moses Znaimer
are just a few of the Canadian Jews who have played innovative roles in the
popular entertainment industry in Canada." [WEINFELD, p. 10]
In that country,
Israel "Izzy" Asper controls CanWest Global. He is the chief
officer of the company that by the mid-1990s was "already the largest
private sector television broadcaster in the country."
[CHISHOLM, p. 36] CanWest is also the
country's "most profitable broadcaster" and has media outlets in every
Canadian major markets except Montreal and Alberta.
[TELEVISION BUS. INT'L] Asper also controls TV 3 in New Zealand
(68% of its stock) and founded TV 4, as well as FM radio
network MORE, in the same country. In Australia,
CanWest has a 76% stake in Network Ten, the second-most
profitable TV station in that country. In Ireland, Asper is the largest
investor in TV3, and his firms also have a financial stake in
Ulster TV. [SCOTLAND, Business, p. 4]
A TV colleague calls
Asper "the most aggressive businessman I know. The guy is a Machiavellian
genius." [CHISHOLM, p. 36] MacLean's notes that:
"Asper's lock on [CanWorld's]
multiple voting shares -- he holds all 26 million
-- has also made him one of the country's richest corporate
players.... By the
time he is through, he wants to carve a global broadcasting force.
He does not say that he will build a dynasty, but
his three offspring
[including Leonard, CanWorld's vice president for
corporate
development; David, the vice president for programming; and
Gail, another
executive] have taken on key corporate roles, and they will
accede to
ownership, so there is that too." [WELLS, p. 40]

Asper blatantly uses his ownership powers to melodramatically
propagandize on behalf of the state of Israel, as he did in the National
Post (a newspaper he controls) in 2001:

"Israel, after 53 years of statehood, remains the only isolated island
of democracy,
human rights and rule of law -- a lonely outpost of Western
civilization and its
values in a sea of terrorism, corruption, dictatorship and human
enslavement.
Countries like Canada should therefore be in the vanguard of its
support,
for mutual economic, military and ethical reasons ... It is therefore a
dismaying
sight for knowledgeable Canadians to watch our Foreign Affairs
minister, John
Manley, either a prisoner of naievete, or political opportunism,
embracing this
war criminal, [Yassar] Arafat, on Mr. Manley's recent visit to the
Middle East."
[ASPER, I. H., 6-19-01] [See chapter on Israel for the details of
Israel's
"democracy."] Other important
Jewish executives at CanWorld have recently included president
Steve Gross, and David Mintz, the head of programming.
Also in Canada, the
wealthy Greenberg family began moving into the mass media in the 1990s,
controlling Astral, Canada's largest pay-per-view and specialty
TV company. The chairman of Astral, Andre Bureau, is also the
former chairman of the Canadian Radio-Television and
Telecommunications Commission. Astral Home Entertainment is
the largest wholesaler of video cassettes in Canada. Harold Greenberg's
original co-partners in his ventures were Phyllis Switzer, Ed Cowan, and
Jerry Grafstein. Barbara Frum host Canada's prominent TV news program,
The Journal.
In Montreal, another
Jewish mogul, Moses Znaimer, is president and executive producer of
CITY-TV, Much Music, Musique Plus, and the
Bravo Network. His sister, Libby, is CITY-TV's
news program money specialist. [HUSTAK, GAZETTE, p. C7]
Much Music's (an MTV clone) video host is also
Jewish -- Erica Ehm. Znaimer started out in the media business by putting
soft pornography on public TV -- fellow Jewish media mogul Robert Lantos
sold him the rights to some films from the New York Erotic Film Festival
early in both their careers, "start[ing] Robert Lantos in business.'"
[ZNAIMER, 9-21-98] A London newspaper headlined Znaimer as "the King of
Me-TV, Znaimer's Influence on Canadian Culture -- and on Television
Worldwide -- Is Difficult to Overstate ... Znaimer Has Shaped An Entire
Generation's Self-Perception." [FRASER, p. F3] Toronto Life described
him as "shirt-buttoned to the collar [with] large, tinted glasses that
evoked a 1970s porn-magnate." [FRASER, M.]
In 1998 a Canadian
magazine called Robert Lantos, head of Alliance Communications,
and later Serendipity Point Films, "one of the original
architects of what we have now [in the Canadian mass media]." [GROSS, P.,
9-21-98] The Toronto Star noted Lantos and Garth
Drabinsky (eventually caught in a financing scandal) as "Canadian's two most
emblematic, brash, creative and -- according to some -- egocentric
entertainment figures." [ADILMAN, 8-29-98, p. M4] Drabinsky founded (with
Myron Gottleib) Livent, America's largest theatre production
company, and Cineplex Odeon, by the 1980s one of North
America's largest movie theatre chains. Until recent scandals,
Livent owned the $43 million Ford Center for the Performing
Arts in New York City, the Pantages Theatre in Chicago, and
the Center for Performing Arts in Chicago, among other
holdings.

In his autobiography, Drabinsky notes the influence upon him of
Canadian Jewish mogul Nat Taylor:

"He was big, the biggest, a legend in the movie business in Canada, the
nearest thing Canada had to a Hollywood mogul. He had been an
exhibitor,
a distributor, a producer, and a TV-station shareholder. He was
partners
with Famous Players, the dominant exhibition chain in Canada. He owned
the coutnry's largest movie-production studio, Toronto International
Studios, in Kleinberg, Ontario. He was the man who opened the first
Canadian movie-house for foreign and art films. He was the guy who came
up with the idea of multiple theatres." [DRABINSKY, G., 1995, p. 56]

Taylor also owned the influential trade journal, Canadian Film
Digest, and hired Drabinsky -- in his early years -- to edit it.
[DRABINSKY, G., 1995, p. 58]

Another noteworthy Jewish cinema/theatre mogul in the early years was
Nathan Nathanson who "built the Panteges [theatre] in 1920 ... Even more
significantly, Nathanson started not only the Famous Players theatre circuit
in Canada but also Canadian Odeon ... He was single-handedly responsible for
the two chains that formed the duopoly that dominated Canadian exhbition for
so long." [DRABINSKY, G. 1995, p. 64] Then there is Allen Karp, "chairman
and chief executive of the Toronto-based Cineplex Odeon Corporation,
Canada's largest film exhibitor." [KIRSHNER, S., 1-7-99]Also in Canada,
Jewish mogul Paul Godfrey is the 1990s chairman of the Toronto Sun
Publishing Company/ Sun Media Group and was the 1998 winner of the B'nai
B'rith Award of Merit. Five families own TorStar, the
parent company of the Toronto Star, the largest newspaper in Canada.
One of the familiess is Jewish : the Thalls. "Their original name was
Rosenthal. [Burnett] Thall says he lopped off the first two syllables to
overcome the anti-Semitism of 1940s Toronto and improve his job prospects."
[REGULY, E., 10-26-01] In 1992, a baptized Jew, Peter Herrnsdorf, became the
CEO and chairman of TV Ontario, replacing Bernard Ostry. (For a
decade Herrnsdorf had been the publisher of Toronto Life magazine.
"Among those who championed Herrnsdorf's installation at TVO,"
notes Toronto Life, "was Howard Bernstein, a senior producer who had
worked for Herrnsdorf at CBC," where Herrnsdorf had also been
an executive). [CANADIAN BUSINESS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS, JULY 1996, p. 56-6;
DINOFF, D., 7-26-99, p. 4]
Yet another Jewish
media head, Jacques Bensimon, member of the "self-help Sephardic Network,"
stepped down in 2000 as the Managing Director of TFO, the
French language division of TV Ontario. "He is widely
considered," notes the Canadian Jewish News, "to be the father of
TFO ... By Bensimon's estimation, his Jewish sensibility helped
enormously, sensitizing him to the perspectives and needs of his French
minority audience." Bensimon left TFO to become an executive at
the Banff Television Festival. Bensimon had earlier served as a
director at the Film Board of Canada. [KIRSCHNER, S.,
7-13-2000]
Sandra Kolber, also
Jewish, became a member of the board of the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation (CBC) in 1991. [SINGER/SELDIN, 1992, p. 34] The
very powerful president and CEO of CBC at
the turn of the millennium is Richard Rabinovitch. (He "spent more than a
decade as chief operating officer of Claridge Inc., [Jewish alcohol
and media mogul] Charles Bronfman's private holding company in Montreal, and
was chairman of the executive committee of the Canadian Jewish Congress's
Quebec region). [GORDON, S., 11-30-01]

Also in Canada, Garry Schwartz heads Phoenix Pictures and
Phyllis Yaffe is the president and CEO of Showcase Television.
Both, too, are Jewish. (The chairman of the Canadian Television
Fund, a private/public partnership that helped fund 330 TV programs and
17 feature films in 1997-98 alone is Richard Stursberg and Tim Kotchoff was
sequentially vice-president of news programming for both CBC
and CTV television networks. Are these two men Jewish as well?)
At the lower media tiers, a panel discussion at a Canadian Jewish Congress
luncheon in 1999 included CBC TV "senior reporter" Joe
Schlesinger, "broadcaster" Evan Solomon, "editorial writer for the
National Post" Ezra Levant, and "associate editor of Now
magazine" Susan Cole. [ROSE, B., 12-9-99, p. 3, 5] Himie Koshevoy died in
2000. He had been the "managing editor of the Vancouver Sun and
subsequently the Toronto Star." [KIRSCHNER, S., 9-14-2000, p. 11]

"Humble Howard" Glassman is a prominent radio show radio host in
Toronto, as is Marsha Lederman. As one Jewish ethnic paper noted about the
usual Jewish subtext in their commentaries:

"Glassman has been under fire from Christian groups for a few years
now, culminating
in last month's 26-page complaint to the Canadian Radio-Television and
and Telecommunications Commission by the Catholic Civil Rights League
and
the Canadian Family Action Coalition. (They sent copies to the B'nai
B'rith
and the Toronto Police Hate Crimes Squad). Particularly at issue was a
series
of bits done by Glassman and sidekick Fred Patterson regarding Jesus
(including the song 'Jesus Was a Fetus') and Easter (a giveaway of
chocolate
Jesus candles, promising to mail their producer to a cross and holding
a
Jesus-lookalike contest ... While [Lederman] has sufficient respect for
her
background to not try to subvert Judaism, she is constantly at odds
with how
much her perspective is shaped by religion. She's been accused of being
anti-Catholic after addressing issues, which she finds odd, since she
currently cohabitates with a Catholic." [WEISBLOT, M., 9-2001]

In 1997, the Alberta Report reported about those who oversee
moral issues for the Canadian television audience (the article was subtitled
"Naked Lesbian Kissing Is Deemed Acceptable for Suppertime TV"):

"A recent decision by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council suggests
that
if Ellen [the American lesbian-oriented TV series] were
produced here, the only
controversy would be whether she would be shown naked in bed with her
lesbian
lover ... Nudity is not yet common on Canadian sitcoms, but the
diaphanously-clad
models featured on such haute couture 'news' programs as CBC
Newsworld's
Fashion File and the syndicated Fashion Television often
resemble Salome
stripped to her last veil ... Two weeks ago the industry-funded CBSC
(which had
earlier dismissed two previous claims against Fashion Television)
dismissed this
complaint as well. The CBSC cited a response from series producer
CITY-TV--
owned by [Jewish mogul] Moses Znaimer, who also co-owns
Alberta's ACCESS-TV
--'We do not equate nudity with pornography. Fashion and photography
to our mind
are art' ... The unnamed complainant had argued in a January 1995
letter, 'These are
prime time family viewing hours and it is highly inappropriate for
such sexually explicit
material to be shown on television.' Ron Cohen, CBSC national
chairman, rejects
this argument as irrelevant, contending that the specialized nature of
the program appeals
to adults only ... Jay Levine, Fashion Television's
producer, adds that nudity is to
be expected from a show covering an industry where 'being sexy is to
be provocative.'
He adds, 'We're doing something that obviously a lot of people don't
have a problem
with ... a few years ago it would have been inconceivable that
producer-writer Ken Finkleman could utter 'the f-word' on his
hit CBC sitcom The Newsroom.'"
[SILLARS, L., 4-28-97]

In Australia, the
pattern continues. Jewish mogul Theodore Fink (1855-1942) "owned the
Herald newspapers, the largest chain in Australia and the largest
publishing enterprise south of the equator." [GREENBERG, M., p. 53] In South
Africa, Jonathan Wacks returned to his homeland as a major Jewish
movie figure after 20 years in the United States. There, he was a film
director, vice-president of production at the Samuel Goldwyn Company,
president of Michael Nesmith's Pacific Arts Pictures, and head of the Moving
Image Arts Department at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico. [MORRIS, M.,
10-23-01]
From America, the
Lauder family fortune, worth $4.2 billion, is rooted in perhaps the richest
woman in the United States, Estee Lauder, the "queen of cosmetics." An heir,
Ronald Lauder, gained a footing in Europe in the mid-1980s while a
Reagan-appointed ambassador to Austria, which was "largely in return for his
work as finance chairman for the New York Republican Party."
Lauder, noted the Jewish Week, has been "active in a wide
variety of causes which aid Israel and world Jewry. [He] is closely
associated with the Israel Bond program ... [Lauder] made a significant
contribution to Vienna's Jewish community by dedicating and opening up for
Jewish immigrants the [Orthodox] Chabad center." [JW, 2-26-88]
He also heads the Jewish National Fund of America.
With the collapse of
the Soviet-controlled Eastern European bloc, Lauder was well-positioned to
embark upon investing in a business empire in Central and Eastern Europe,
particularly in television and telecommunications. A
former executive (Itzik Fisher) at Israel's national telephone company,
Bezeq, was installed as head of Lauder's RSL
Communications. Mr. Lauder (also current Chairman of the Board of the
Museum of Modern Art) was not alone among those most prominently searching
for profit, control, and cultural influence in the collapsed communist area.
A 1990 New York Times article highlighted five American investors in
Hungary; at least four of them were Jewish, including Lauder. Another,
Albert Reichmann, one of three brothers controlling a company that
Business Week calls "the richest and most powerful real estate developer
in the world,' told the magazine: "The Jewish population is the reason I'm
interested in Hungary and the Soviet Union." [NYT, 1-26-90]
In 1990 Lauder gained
principal ownership of the Hungarian Credit Bank Ltd, and in 1992 he had 50%
share in an eastern German engineering firm. By 1997 a Lauder-controlled
company -- Central European Media Enterprises -- held
television stations in seven European countries, including Romania,
Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic, and operated eleven TV stations
in Poland alone, ironically called "Independent Polish Television."
[BRZEZINSKI, p. A41] CME became the largest
private television broadcasting organization in Europe. [MCELVOGUE]
The publisher/editor-in-chief of the English-language general
information newspaper in Poland, the Warsaw Voice is also Jewish --
Andrzej Jonas. One of the paper's crusades has been against a cluster of
Christian crosses near Auschwitz. [See, for example, 6-6-99] He also
publishes the English-language Okecie Airport magazine, the other
newspaper visiting Americans are likely to read in English in Poland. The
publisher of Gazeta Wyborcza, one of Poland's most widely circulated
newspapers, is Adam Michnik. He is also Jewish.
By 1989, Poland's
first cable TV system, Polska Telewizja Kablowa, was 70%
controlled by Jewish entrepreneur David Chase's Chase Enterprises).
[LOS ANGELES TIMES, 12-8-89, p. D4] In 1996, with the continued
de-monopolization of Poland's communist-era RP Telekom telecommunications
company, the Jerusalem Post noted the "position" of Israeli Shmuel
Dankner in the Eastern European country's telecommunications field:
"Dankner is well
positioned to become a key player in the country's transition to market
economics. Yet he doesn't appear intent to do that. In fact, it seems as
if Dankner is careful to keep his own and his partner's foreign
profiles low." [ASA-EL, A., 7-17-96, p. 6]
Dankner partners
include fellow Israelis Meir Srebernik and Sharon Waizer "who runs an R.P.
Telekom joint venture with Motorola." "If anything," Waizer said about
Poland, "my stay here so far has made of me a prouder Zionist." [ASA-El, A,
7-17-96, p. 6] By 1997, Dankner's Dankner Investments, its
subsidiary Matar, and General Electric held "majority shares"
in RP Telekom. [MIDDLE EAST NEWS, 3-24-97] By 1998, a telecommunications
firm called Netia had "emerged as the largest provider of local
fixed line telephone services in Poland ... It holds the concessions for
five of the ten biggest cities ... and has licensing covering a third of the
population [of Poland]." Owned by a consortium of companies (Telia from
Switzerland, Dankner Investments, Shamrock Holdings, Trefoil
Capital Investments, and Goldman Sachs Capital), the CEO was
Israeli Meir Srebernik. [FINANCIAL TIMES, 3-25-98, p. 8]
In 1999, Ronald
Lauder's CME merged with the Swedish-based SBS
Broadcasting. The new company (retaining the SBS name) now
owned 18 TV and 12 radio companies in 13 countries (TV stations included
those in the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Norway, Finland, Italy,
Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, Ukraine, Switzerland, and Poland). Ronald Lauder
now shared the Co-Chairmanship of the new firm with Harry Evans Sloan. Sloan
is also from America -- originally a lawyer in
Hollywood. Sloan once headed New WorldEntertainment
and built his early media empire with Lawrence Kuppin via junk bond
financing.
Another Jewish
businessman, Michael Finkelstein, formerly the Vice-Chairman of SBS,
became Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board of the new entity. "CME
stations [in Central and Eastern Europe]," noted the Central European
Business Weekly, "are ranked number one in both audience and revenues in
all markets except Hungary where the SBS station, TV 2,
is number one." [ANTHONY, M., p. 1]
In 1997, in the Czech
Republic, one of Ronald Lauder's stations, TV Nova
-- one that reaches 70% of the Czech broadcasting audience and was
originally founded by five Czech intellectuals in Prague, was embroiled in
controversy. The control of Nova by Lauder, noted the Wall Street
Journal, "is raising fears about foreign ownership in broadcasting
throughout the region ... [Some Czechs] were worried that the country's
liberalized media laws have created a huge foreign force in the market.
Czech regulators are investigating Nova for alleged license
breaches and have threatened to pull the plug on the station ... Adding to
the pressure, one of the founders of the station is suing Nova
over control and labeled it 'an American propaganda machine.'"
[FRANK, p. A1] "Newspaper editorials attack the influence of 'Nova
sleaze' on Czech culture,” noted the Journal, "Government
ministers privately suggest Nova's gory prime-time features are to blame for
the recent rise in crime." [FRANK, p. A1] In Poland in
the same year, arsonists set fire to a Warsaw synagogue located next door to
the offices of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, an organization attempting
to reassert an international organizational Jewish presence in Poland.
Maneuvering around
Czech ownership and licensing laws that addressed foreign ownership, the
control of TV Nova was technically deeded, in association with
Lauder, to a Czech national, Vladimir Zelezny. Zelezny, not surprisingly, is
also Jewish ("Zelezny and Lauder have much in common, including a passion
for collecting art collecting and Jewish philanthropy.")
[MORTKOWITZ/ERNSBERGER, 1-17-00] He is also "one of the wealthiest men in
the Czech Republic." [MEILS, C., 3-5-01] By the year 2000 the two Jewish
moguls had a falling out in a struggle for full control of the station.
Lauder eventually sued Zelezny for 140 counts of alleged fraud. Lauder also
sued the Czech government. However, noted Newsweek, "Lauder has said
he'd drop the case against the Czech government if CME is
allowed to purchase Prima [the second largest TV station in the
Czech Republic]." [MARTKOWICZ/ERNSBERGER, 1-17-00, p. 46] "It is widely
believed, noted Variety, that Zelezny also covertly manages Prima
TV, Nova's main commercial rival." [DAWTREY, A., 1-22-01]
And what was the
effect of this Jewish-controlled TV Nova upon Czech culture? Local professor
Jan Culik noted that "educated people have been horrified by what this
station has been to doing to Czech society, especially the violence and its
effects on kids." The Jewish Week described the station's fare:
"There, on the TV
screen each night, on Lauder's flagship European station, a buxom,
frontally naked weather lady would coyly tell viewers how to dress for the
next day's weather. The erotic weather forecast, as it was called, was
part of a newscast that media industry observers describe as among the
most gory and sensationalist anywhere, with graphic depictions of
beheadings, burnt bodies and other mayhem. Later, after 11 each
evening, the station, TV Nova, would follow up with soft core
pornography. And on another program, 'Taboo,' sexual
deviants such as
molesters, sado-masochists and rapists who would
frankly discuss their
sexual activities." [COHLER-ESSES, L., 1-21-2000,
p. 16]

Jewish influence in the mass media of Czechoslovakia has a long
history. Prior to the rise of the Nazis, in the 1930s "the largest [motion
picture] producer was the Elekta Film concern, with its imaginative
chairman, Josef Auerbach." [PICK, J., 1968, p. 422] And as Avigdor Dagan
notes about the Czech popular press in this era:

"As in all other countries in Central Europe, so in the Czech lands,
Jews played
an outstanding role in journalism. The editor-in-chief of the Prager
Press, the German-
language organ of the Government, Arne Laurin, was Jewish. Another Jew,
Paul Eisner, was editor of its Cultural Supplement, and many Jews
served on
the editorial staff. Among the Czech-language papers, there was hardly
one
without Jews on its editorial and literary staff. Jewish journalists
could be found
in papers of all parties from the right to the left ... Even the
Catholic organLidove Listy had a partly Jewish editor in the person of Alfred
Fuchs, a Jewish
convert." [DAGAN, A., 1968, p. 523]

In 1997, in the
process of expanding his Eastern European media empire into the Ukraine,
Ronald Lauder also gained unwelcome publicity when it was revealed that a
Jewish Russian partner in the deal, Vadim Rabinovich (who owns "one of the
country's most popular television channels"), had ties to the Russian mafia.
Rabinovich is also the founder and president of the All-Ukrainian Jewish
Congress. It's chairman is Grigory Surkis who also owns a TV station, the
country's most popular soccer team, oil-related firms, and a law company.
[KRICHEVSKY, Around, p. 6] One of Rabinovich's
partners, Grigory Lautchansky, in another project, owned a Vienna-based
trading company that the Director of the CIA had once called "an
organization associated with Russian crime activity." Lautchansky (spelled
various ways, also Grigori Loutchansky) was noted in the New York Review
of Book's review of The Red Mafiya:

"Along with [Russian Jewish crime boss Semion] Mogilevich, American
officials
put high on their list of suspects two of his lieutenants, Gregori
Loutchansky and
Vadim Rabinovitch. Loutchansky ran a trading company called Nordex,
which
American and European officials say has links to Russian organized
crime and
once acted as a broker in the sale of Scud missiles from North Korea to
Iraq.
Rabinovitch ran the Nordex office in Kiev. In Israel, the Russian mob
leaders
have bought protection from senior government officials, and have
poured so
so much money into political campaigns that they have been able to name
candidates for local and national office. The admired former Soviet
dissident
Natan Sharansky, who has become active in Israeli politics, has
admitted taking
campaign contributions from Nordex, in spite of pleas from American
officials
to cut his links with Loutchansky. Loutchansky invited a list of
prominent Russian
mobsters to his birthday party in Israel in 1996." [BONNER, 11-16-00]

Vadim Rabinovich himself (Lauder's direct partner) had spent eight
years in a Russian prison but the New York Times noted that he
claimed that "he had committed no real crime and had been persecuted for
being Jewish." The (Jewish) Forward noted in
August 1997 that Rabinovich "holds 25% stake in the company that runs
Ukraine's only private television station. Cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder owns
half the station." [FORWARD, p. 8-29-97, p. 3] Within months a rival
Ukrainian TV station -- PerekhidMedia Enterprises
-- filed a lawsuit charging that Lauder's company and its Ukrainian partners
used "criminal connections and corrupt methods" to get a broadcast license.
[FRANTZ A4, BRZINSKI A18, FRANKEL A1; MURPHY A6; McElvogue D4; BRZINSKI A41;
AUERBACH, S., F4]
In August 1997,
Rabinovich's All Ukrainian Jewish Congress bought a full page ad in the
New York Times to call attention to anti-Semitism, and investment
potential, in the Ukraine. "The Jewish issue will never get the attention it
deserves without your active help," said the ad, "After all, if American
Jews don't care about their Ukrainian brothers and sisters, why should
anyone else?" [FORWARD, 8-29-97, p. 3] A month earlier
Rabinovich met for unity talks with Michael Schneider, the vice-president of
the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. "Mr. Rabinovich's ad,"
noted the (Jewish) Forward, "comes as American-Jewish groups, such as
the Jewish Committee and the World Jewish Congress, are increasing their
role in Europe." [FORWARD, p 8-29-97, p. 3]

In June 2001, the New York Times noted that Lauder's Central
European Enterprises company was

"under an investigation over allegations that it paid at least $1
million in bribes
to Ukrainian officials for a valuable television license, according to
lawyers
and [U.S.] Justice Department documents ... In Ukraine, Central
European
Media controls the most popular station through its majority-owned
subsidiary
Studio 1+1 ... The principal owners [of Studio 1+1] were [Jewish
moguls] Vadim Rabinovich and Boris Fuchsmann, well known around Kiev
for their influential wealth.
Less well known were their ties to Russian organized crime, according
to reports
by the F.B.I. and European law enforcement agencies ... A 1994 F.B.I
report
on Russian organized crime in the United States described Mr. Fuchsmann
as a gold smuggler and embezzler, whose company in Germany was part of
an international crime network. He is barred from entering the United
States ...
Besides Mr. Fuchsmann and Mr. Rabinovich, there were other, silent
owners
of Studio 1+1. In one internal fax, in April 1996, Ms. Jensen [a
CME employee]
described the Studio 1+1 shareholders as 'extremely powerful'
people whom,
she added, 'I will not mention on this fax.' Central European Media now
owns
at least 60 percent of Studio 1+1, and Mr. Fuchsmann owns at
least 30 percent,
according to public statements." [BONNER, R., 6-12-01]

And what are some of
Ronald Lauder's prior track records in television? What are his interests?
What perspectives might he bring to Central and Eastern Europe? Aside from
creating the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation to revive Jewish culture in Eastern
Europe, he has expressed considerable interest in pressing attention upon
the Jewish Holocaust. He is founder of a right-wing think tank in Jerusalem,
the Shalem Institute. In his 1989 bid to become the mayor of New York City,
he attacked his opponent, Rudolph Giulani, in a TV ad, saying: "he
handcuffed innocent stockbrokers in front of co-workers and ignored the
torment of a Holocaust survivor." [MAY, p. A27] In 1988 he financed a
documentary shown on PBS about the 1938 Nazi attack upon Jewish synagogues
in Austria and Germany. [SMITH, C, p. 32] And in 1994 his media company in
Europe "kicked off the first commercial broadcast in Eastern Europe with the
film 'Sophie's Choice' [a Nazi concentration camp story]." [FRANK, R, p. A1]
In the political realm, in 1997 the Jewish Week noted that
Jewish American Lauder is "reportedly among Netanyahu's biggest financial
backers." [Netanyahu, of course, is the former right-wing prime minister of
Israel]. [COHLER-ESSES, Dissensions, p. 1] "With money and campaign
contacts," notes the (Jewish) Forward, "Mr. Lauder has helped
engineer one of the biggest upsets in the history of Israel's democracy."
[FORWARD, 11-14-97, p. 14]
In 1999 Ronald Lauder
became what the Jewish Week called the "King of the Jews" -- the head
of the Presidents' Conference of Major Jewish Organizations. "Some [Jewish]
leaders," noted the Week, "are expressing concern about what they see
as the continuing lack of democracy [in that organization] ... Several
left-wing groups complained that Lauder is perceived as being too close to
[right-wing Israeli prime minister Benyamin] Netanyahu, both as a personal
friend and a major political contributor." [GREENBERG, 1-15-99, p. 20]
With the fall of
communism in the Soviet bloc, yet another Jewish media "tycoon," this one in
Hungary, rose to power in recent years. This one, Janos Fenyo, was murdered
in 1998, apparently by criminal underworld elements. At the time, as founder
and head of Vico Distributing and Publishing ("currently the
biggest print media-owner in Hungary"), [MARYNIAK, I., 4-1-98] he controlled
Hungarian 13 newspapers (including the fomer trade union journal Nepszava
and a women's journal, Nok Lapja) and Nap TV. "Fenyo had
excellent contacts to leading Hungarian politicians and he skillfully
exploited the confusing legal situation after the collapse of communism to
boost his empire." At the time of his death, he also had 30 lawsuits filed
against him. [DEUTSCHE PRESSE-AGENTUR, 5-21-98]
Turning to the
nearby new capitalist nation of Russia, in 1997 the Washington Post
noted that
"In last year's
presidential campaign, two of the most powerful media
tycoons,
Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, played a key role
in reelecting
President Boris Yeltsin, demonstrating the might of
television in
the young democracy." [HOFFMAN, p. 12]
The Wall Street
Journal noted that Gusinsky (also spelled Goussinsky) "is sometimes
billed as the richest man in Russia." [WALL ST, 4-13-95]
For his part, Berezovsky was listed by Forbes in 1997 as one of the
"ten top" billionaires in the world. Both Gusinsky and Berezovsky
(originally Abramovitch) are Jewish. Gusinsky is also the president of the
Russian Jewish Congress and his circle of international Jewish connections
includes the aforementioned Ronald Lauder and Edgar Bronfman of the World
Jewish Congress. A source told the Jewish Week that Gusinsky founded
the Russian Jewish Congress so his "physical well-being will no longer be
just [his] personal concern; it will be of international [Jewish] interest,”
i.e., whatever he does, he can tap into the powerful international Jewish
defense mother lode against "anti-Semitism." [COHLER-ESSES, p. 13] The
Jerusalem Post notes that in Israel "media reports [were] hinting" that
Gusinsky "had ties to the Russian mafia." [COHEN, A.]
Gusinsky built his business empire from his Most Bank; the
Chairman of the Board of the Most Bank is Boris Hait who is
also one of the vice-presidents of the Russian Jewish Congress. Other
vice-presidents of the Jewish organization include Mikhail Friedman,
Chairman of the board of the Alpha Bank, and Vitali Malkin,
President of the Rossiiiski Kredit Bank.
Gusinsky's media
empire includes NTV television -- the largest commercial
television station in Russia with an audience of 120 million. It also
broadcasts to Israel, and "recently [December 1997] unveiled plans to expand
its Russian-language broadcasts to Western Europe and other parts of the
Middle East." [KRICHEVSKY, p. 10] (Even in the New York
area, the Russian-language Russian Television Network is run by
a rabbi, president Mark Golub. Alexander Polovets, the editor and publisher
of Panorama, "the most influential Russian-language newspaper in the
United States," is also Jewish. [TUGEND, 10-22-99]). Gusinsky also controls
the Echo of Moscow radio station; a weekly magazine called
Itogi (published in partnership with Newsweek/The
Washington Post); the newspaper Segodnya; and
NTV-Plus, a pay-per-view satellite network. In 1997, the Russian
Orthodox patriarch, Alexei II, charging blasphemy, declared that "God would
punish those responsible" for screening Martin Scorsese's film The Last
Temptation of Christ on Mr. Gubinsky's television channel. The program
had been postponed twice "because of Orthodox Christian fury." [MEEK, p. 1]
With mind-boggling chutzpah, NTV had originally planned
to show the film "in April, on Russian Easter." [KRICHEVSKY,
Jewish-Owned, p. 9] Meanwhile, "at Gusinksi's
influence," noted the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 1998, "a synagogue
and Holocaust museum are now being built at the World War II Memorial site
in Moscow." [MILNER]

In 2001, the deputy head of the Russian Jewish Congress, Mikhail
Miralashvili was arrested in Russia and charged with kidnapping. "Mr.
Mirilashvili," noted London's Independent,

"who holds joint Israeli and Russian citizenship, was due to leave
Russia this
week with the Israeli President, Moshe Katzav, who is on a state visit.
Mr.
Mirlashvili is a director of the St. Petersburg company Russian Video,
which
was bought by Media-Most, controlled by Mr. Gusinsky, in 1997. Mr.
Gusinsky was later accused of defrauding the state by buying the
company
for $10 million -- well below its real value." [COCKBURN, P., 1-25-01]In July 1997, the
Jewish Week reported that
"the Russian Jewish
Congress, a powerful new group headed by one of
Russia's most
prominent and controversial millionaires, has signed a
landmark agreement
with American Jewry's top umbrella organization [the Conference of
Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations], pledging joint
cooperation and consultation ... The National Conference on Soviet Jewry,
another U.S. umbrella group that encompasses many of the same Jewish
organizational members as the Presidents Conference, was
also a signatory.... Some, including a top Russian
Jewish Congress
official, says it marks a milestone in the emergence of
the Russian group
as an influential diaspora player on the international
stage ... In a
separate initiative, the Russian Jewish Congress signed an
agreement at about
the same time with the World Jewish Congress..."
[COHLER-ESSES,
Lawyer, p. 9]
(A note about the
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations: It
represents, notes Jewish journalist Wolf Blitzer, "more than thirty of the
most important national Jewish organizations; it has come to be viewed as
the authoritative voice of the mainstream Jewish leadership ... Because the
Presidents' Conference, like AIPAC [the leading American Jewish Israel
lobbying organization], can almost always be found in support of the
official Israeli position, U.S. officials in all recent administrations have
to view it as a de facto arm of the Israeli government." [BLITZER, p.
141-142])
Gusinsky also met
with a number of Jewish American Congressmen, including Carl Lewin, Frank
Lautenberg, Joseph Lieberman, and Arlen Specter. "The Middle East and
'rising anti-Semitism' were among the topics discussed," noted Don Bonker
("a former Congressman who handles public relations for Goussinsky in
Washington"). [COHLER-ESSES, US RUSSIAN, p. 1] The
Jewish Week further noted that "according to a Jewish official who spoke
on the condition of anonymity, Goussinsky's efforts to meet with top State
Department officials were rebuffed due to what one State official ; as his
'checkered past.'" [COHLER-ESSES, US-RUSSIAN, p. 1] In 2000, Gusinsky, who,
like other Rusisan Jewish media moguls, has dual Russian-Israeli
citizenship, fled Russia after accusations of fraud. In October, related to
the Gusinsky criminal investigation, Russian police raided the central
Moscow synagogue, searching "practically everything," but particularly
looking for "in what way was the Jewish community ... laundering money it
was receiving from its sponsors." Alexander Osovtsov, Executive Vice
President of the Russian Jewish Congress, complained: "What gives special
cynicism to it is the fact that the action was undertaken on the single day
when the leaders of the Congress and the Jewish community were absent from
Moscow because they were on a one-day visit of peace and solidarity to
Israel." [INTERFAX RUSSIAN NEWS, 10-20-00]
Boris Berezovsky's
riches began with Logovaz, a car dealership. He has since
rapidly gained control of the Russian Public Television network, known as
ORT; the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta; the weekly
magazine Ogonyok; Transero, a Russian airline; and
80% of Russia's seventh largest oil company, which merged in 1998 with
another Jewish-owned oil firm (together called Yuksi), to create "the
world's largest oil company in terms of reserves." [MCMAHON, p. 3]
"Berezovsky," says the Wall Street Journal, "has a reputation for
labyrinthine political and business intrigues and has in the past exercised
influence over Russian companies, including the national airline
Aeroflot, without taking over formal ownership." [HIGGINS, p. 2]
"Like many of the
people in Russia who became rich very fast," notes the New York
Times, "Mr. Berezovsky has been the subject of numerous press reports
that suggest he relied on organized crime to build his business empire."
[STANLEY, p. A3] Berezovsky, notes the Washington
Post, "is part of a tight circle of financiers and business moguls who,
by his own estimate, control half of Russia's economy ... [HOFFMAN,
Russia]. ... They all attained wealth in the violent, corruption-ridden,
high-stakes competition that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union five
years ago.... The scramble for wealth and power was carried out with brutal
means, often including car bombs and assassinations.... Russian tycoons are
not public heroes. Popular resentments run deep over the vast sell-off of
state property, which made many of them rich and left millions of Russians
in poverty." [HOFFMAN, p. A26] Berezovsky, notes the
(Jewish) Forward, is one of the "robber barons accused of milking
Russians dry." [BLUSTAIN, p. 1]
In 1999 Berezovsky
gained control of Moscow's popular TV-6 television station.
That same year he claimed control of "Russia's premiere daily newspaper,
Kommersant," and fired its editor, Raf Shakirov, who said that "his
ouster [is] an attempt to curb often critical coverage of the tycoon's
business and political activities." [HIGGINS, p. 2]
In December 1996,
Forbes magazine published a scathing article about Berezovsky (making
sure such reports will be few and far between, the multi-billionaire
responded by punishing the magazine with a suit for libel, as did the other
Jewish tycoon giant, Vladmir Gusinsky, against the Wall Street Journal
for an unflattering report about him). [WALL ST JRNL,
4-13-95] The Forbes article, entitled "The Godfather of the Kremlin,"
was printed with no byline for fear of violent retribution to its authors.
"Berezovsky," noted the magazine's editor, James Michaels, "stands tall as
one of the most powerful men in Russia. Behind him lies a trail of corpses,
uncollected debts and competitors terrified for their lives." [MICHEALS, p.
10]
The anonymously
written article in Forbes notes that
"Assassination is a
tool of business competition. Scores of business
leaders and media
personalities have been killed ... Berezovsky controls
Russia's biggest
national TV network. His control was solidified shortly after the first
chairman of the network was assassinated gangland style.
Berezovsky was
immediately fingered by the police as a key suspect,
but the murder
remains unsolved two years later ... Such is the Russian
business
environment today that the men at the top have use for the
shadowy army of
killers and thugs who work further down in the scale
of corruption,
running prostitute and protection rackets." [FORBES, p.
91, 92]
In 1995 Vladislav
Listiev, one of Russia's most popular television talk show hosts, was named
head of the Russian Public Television network (ORT). One of his
major efforts was to rid the station of the corrupt, monopolistic
advertising empire of a man named Sergei Lisovsky. The Forbes article
suggests that Berezovsky was involved in Listiev's eventual assassination,
and when Berezovsky ended up with a controlling interest in ORT
(36%), he retained Livosky as the only agent for the company's advertising.
Incredibly, in 1996
Berezovsky vast wealth and power afforded him the opportunity to become a
member of the Kremlin Security Council, a position that meant access to some
of the Russian government's most sensitive national secrets. He was soon
embroiled in a scandal over his national allegiance when the liberal
newspaper Izvestia publicized the fact that Berezovsky had secured
Israeli citizenship in 1994. Berezovsky threatened to sue the newspaper,
charging anti-Semitism. [SHALAPENTOKH, p. 19] (Meanwhile, the ruthless baron
publicly declares he is a convert to Christianity). [KRICHEVSKY, L.,
5-23-99]
A year later
Fortune magazine ran an article entitled "Russia's Robber Barons,"
profiling ten of the most important Russian business tycoons who have
catapulted to economic dominance in Russia with the collapse of communism;
these included Gusinsky, Berezovsky, Boris Hait, Mikhail Friedman, Vladimir
Vinogradov, Vladimir Potanin, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Alexander Smolensky, and
Pyotr Aven.
Along with Gusinsky
and Berezovsky, not only are Hait and Friedman Jewish, they are, as noted
earlier, vice-presidents under Gusinsky in the Russian Jewish Congress.
Khodorovsky, the President of Bank Menatep (and, curiously, the
former Deputy Secretary of the Moscow Branch of the Communist Party youth
branch) is also Jewish. (Khodorovsky's ability to make ideological U-turns
on a dime somewhat echoes the latent wheeling and dealing of Leonid Roitman,
whose "meteoric rise to power was fueled by the chaos of post-pestroika
Russia." In his earlier years, under the communist regime, says the
Jerusalem Post, Roitman set up "an organization called Hatehiya, which
taught summer camps for Jewish youth. In a brilliant move, he registered
Hatehiya as part of Komosol, the Communist Youth movement, and it rapidly
became 'one of the largest and strongest organizations in Russia.'" [HECHT,
p. 12]]
Continuing the
Fortune list, Pyotr Aren, of the Alpha financial group, is
also Jewish. Smolensky, president of Stolichny
Bank and Vinogradov, head of Inkombank, are also --
according to a B'nai B'rith publication -- "believed to be Jews."
[BERNSTEIN, RUSSIA'S, p. 12] (Many Jews in Eastern
Europe publicly hide this fact of their identity). Of this group of economic
dominators, that leaves only Potanin who is not Jewish (in a country where
today less than half of 1% of the Russian population is Jewish [BERNSTEIN,
p. 12]), but he has had American Jewish billionaire George Soros as a major
backer in some of his deals, including the takeover of Russia's
Svyazinvest telecommunications giant. (Soros has "invested around $2.5
billion in Russia, more than anyone or any institution." [BROWNING, p. F2]
"Soros's
extraordinary role," noted the (London) Guardian in 1994, "not only
as the world's most successful investor but now possibly, fantastically, as
the single most powerful foreign influence in the whole of the former Soviet
empire, attracts more suspicion than curiosity." [LEWIS, M., p. 14] "I have
been a prime target for the current version of anti-Semitic conspiracy
theory," notes Soros himself, "If there was ever a man who fit the
stereotype of the Judeo-plutocratic Bolshevik Zionist world conspirator, it
is me. And that is, in fact, how I am increasingly depicted in Eastern
Europe and also to some extent in Western Europe, but not so much in
America." [SOROS, p. 239])
The above ten
Russians, notes the Fortune piece, "dominate the country's trade in
arms and precious metals, as well as its production of copper, nickel, and a
quarter of its oil. They control the No. 1 and No. 3 television networks,
the Visa bankcard network, a big chunk of the pulp and paper industry, and
an increasing portion of the food processing industry ... Princeton
professor Stephen Cohen, writing in the Nation, dubbed [most of
today's Russian business elite] a 'semi-criminalized oligarchy' that has
made ordinary Russians 'suffer unduly and unjustly.'" [MELLOW, p. 120]
Berezovsky has publicly bragged that he, Gusinsky, Khodorovsky, Aren,
Friedman, Smolensky, and Potanin control half of Russia's wealth. [BERSTEIN,
p. 12]

As Jewish scholar Betsy Gidwitz noted in 1999:

"That Jews control a disproportionately large share of the Russian
economy
and Russian media certainly has some basis in fact. Between 50 and 80
percent
of the Russian economy is said to be in Jewish hands, with the
influence of the
five Jews among the eight individuals commonly referred to as
"oligarchs" particularly
conspicuous. (An oligarch is understood to be a member of a small
group that
exercises control in a government. The five oligarchs of Jewish
descent are Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Friedman, Vladimir Gusinsky,
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and
Alexander Smolensky. The other oligarchs are Vagit Alekperov, Vladimir
Potanin,
and Rem Vyakhirev.) Perhaps the most famous (and simultaneously the
most infamous)
of the oligarchs is Boris Berezovsky. In common with most of the other
Jewish
oligarchs, Berezovsky controls industries in three critical areas: the
extraction and
sale of a major natural resource, such as oil, as a source of great
wealth; a large
bank (useful in influencing industry and transferring assets abroad);
and several
major media outlets (useful for exerting influence and attacking
rivals). He also
controls a significant share of the Aeroflot airline and the Moscow
automobile
industry." [GIDWITZ, B., 9-15-99]A 1999 Wall Street
Journal editorial notes that disturbing situation in today's Russia:
"Russia's oligarchs
-- many of them apparatchiks from the communist days -- have
stripped the country's best assets and transferred their winnings to
off-shore companies they control ... For every dollar a Russian has
laundered abroad there had to be a counterparty at the other end.
London, Geneva, and New York are preferred
destinations, as
well as off-shore havens such as Cyprus and
New Jersey.
Estimates of $10 billion capital flight from Russia
each year are
probably conservative." [W S J, 8-30-99, p. 8]
By 1998, the foreign
minister of Russia was Yevgeni Primakov. His real last name -- Finkelstein
-- was dropped when he worked for the KGB. Also that year, Sergio Kiriyenko
became the prime minister of Russia. He too is Jewish. [SAFIRE, p. 6]
Primatov later succeeded him as Prime Minister. "Two of the main
political leaders in Parliament," adds the Times of London, "Grigori
Yavlinsky, the leader of the liberal Yabloko Party, and Vladimir Zhirnovsky,
the head of the ultra-nationalist LDPR, also have Jewish parents." [BEESTON]
A Los Angeles Times reporter notes that "at least half of the
powerful 'oligarchs' who control a significant percentage of the [Russian]
economy are Jewish. The reviled architect of Yeltsin's failed reform
policies, Antaloy Chubais, [later head of the national electrical power
monopoly], is rumored to be Jewish, along with Prime Minister Yevgeny
Primakov, ousted Deputy Minister Boris Nemtsov and Yeltsin's wife, Naina."
[REYNOLDS, p. 7A] The Jewish Telegraph Agency noted that "Chubais is
not ... open about his Jewish roots." [KRICHEVSKY, L., 5-23-99]
Alexander Livshitz also served a spell as Russia's finance minister
in the 1990s. [KRICHEVSKY, L., 5-23-99]
In 1999, the
Jewish Exponent noted that
"all but one of the
eight leading [Russian] bankers are Jewish," and four of them --
Goussinsky, Boris Hait, Mikhail Friedman, and Vitaly Malkin -- occupy
the top positions at the RJC [Russian Jewish
Congress] ... In
addition to these business titans, often referred to here in the
[Russian] media and on the street as the 'oligarchs,'
many of the leading
political figures in Russia are also Jewish
or partly Jewish.
These include fomer prime Minster Sergei Kiriyenko
and top Kremlin
aides Yegor Gaidar and Boris Nemtsov. Grigori Yavlinsky, the
leader of the Yabloko, the largest democratic party in the Duma today, has one
Jewish parent ... In the new Russia, the most
important fields
... to which Jews [have] gravitated [are] banking,
trade, the media,
and show business." [RUBY, W., p. 37]
In late 1998,
Viktor Ilyukin, the head of the Russian Parliament's Security Affairs
Committee, said this about the Yeltsin government: "The large-scale genocide
[i.e., Russian social and economic collapse] wouldn't have been possible if
Yeltsin's inner circle had consisted of the main ethnicity groups, and not
exclusively of one group, the Jews." [NEW YORK TIMES, Communist, p.
12] That same year, Nikolai Kandratenko, the governor of
a southern Russian province, called the government of the area's largest
city "a Zionist nest" exemplifying a "Judeo-Masonic mafia." [KRICHEVSKY, L.,
Russian, p. 7]
Meanwhile, also in
the same year, the Jerusalem Post noted a more commonly enforced
stereotypes about the situation of Jews in Russia:
"[A Christian woman
in Dallas] heard about some young Jews in the former Soviet Union
getting help via a soup kitchen. She decided to become the adoptive
grandmother, sending in a monthly contribution for their welfare."
[COHEN, A., p. 11]

As Jewish scholar Michael Paul Sacks noted in 1998 about the almost
secretive nature of the economic situation of Jews in modern Russia:

"Published census data on Jews [in Russia] have been very scarce, but
this
[from the 1989 Russian census] and other sources leave no doubt that
in
comparision with other groups Soviet Jews were very distinctive in
terms
of their urban concentration and their educational and professional
achievement ... With the recent release of new data from the 1989
census,
a more precise understanding of the opportunities available to Jews in
'Soviet' Russia is now possible. These data show the number of men and
women by major ethnic groups (including Jews) in 257 job categories.
Surprisingly, this new information is not referred to even in the most
recent
Russian scholarship on Jews, and it received no mention in western
sources
... Jews showed a very early path of upward mobility in the
modernizing
sectors of the labor force ... [SACKS, 1998, p. 247] ... Occupations
that
that were largest for Jews were primarily top-level positions and all
were
white collar: physicians, scientists, chief-managerial personnel,
artists
and producers, literary and press personnel. The [job] categories that
were largest only for Russians were entirely manual labor and other
low-skills; tractor drivers, cleaners, weighers, nursemaids, lathe
operators, tailors and seamstresses, carpenters and dairy work."
[SACKS, M., 1998, p. 257]

A 1995 study in Russia found that 84% of employed Jews had
"professional or managerial positions." Another 4% were "owners of firms or
entrepreneurs." [SACKS, M., 1998, p. 265] With the likes of
Gusinsky, Berezovsky, and other powerful Jewish business tycoons wielding
extraordinary influence and blatantly buying (and allegedly even killing)
their broad way into the Russian media, business, and government, (as well
as centrally placed Jews in the Russian government like Finance Minister
Alexander Livshits and First Deputy Minister in Charge of Economic Reform,
Boris Nemtsov), the Christian Science Monitor noted in 1997 that
"A loose coalition
of nationalistic communists and out-and-out
[Russian]
nationalists has begun to characterize President Boris
Yeltsin's regime as
'Jewish.' It is the Jewishness of Mr. Yeltsin's
regime, its
essential foreignness to Russia, that [in this view] explains
the plummeting
economy, the brazen corruption and enrichment of the few ... and
Russia's subservient position to the West."
[SHLAPENTOKH, p.
19; WALL ST, 4-13-95, p. A14; HOFFMAN, D., 1-10-97, p. A1;
STANLEY, 6-14-97, p. A3]
Still another angle on
Jewish economic dominance at the upper tiers of capitalist Russia was a 1998
article in the Israeli daily, Haaretz, which noted
"The most successful
venture capitalists in the world in 1996 and 1997 operated out of
Moscow and was started by an Israeli. The Hermitage 1and
Hermitage 2 funds specialize in investments in Russia and other
countries of the
former Soviet Union, although they invest throughout the world. They were
set up in 1995 by Israeli businessman Benny
Steinmatz and the
Safra brothers [and are] managed by American Bill Broder ...
Hermitage is considered the most senior player on the
Moscow Stock
Exchange, and it is the second-largest of the fund
managers active in
Russia, with some $600 million to invest." [LIPSON]

Then there is Boris Jordan, also Jewish, from New York's Long Island,
eventual head -- after Vladimir Gusinsky fled to Israel to escape criminal
prosecution -- of Russian television station NTV,

"who almost single-handedly established the Russian stock market, who
in one
year earned half the global profits for his employers at Credit Suisse
First Boston,
who walked away from a reported $4 million bonus because it was
insultingly small
and instead founded Russia's first full-service investment bank, which
he optimistically called Renaissance Capital. Brash, bright and
above all ambitious, Jordan more than
any other individual put Russia on the financial map in the 90's.
'Czar Boris,' as he
was dubbed by admiring business reporters, held court high atop
Moscow's most
expensive new skyscraper, while Renaissance's 800 pinstriped
bankers and brokers
handled billions of dollars from blue-chip investors like George Soros
and the
Harvard endowment. The darling of Davos, the Swiss summit for the well
heeled
and influential, Jordan was, in his own words, on top of the world."
[BRZENSKI,
M., 7-22-01, p. 40]Yet another Jewish
Russian money mogul is Roman Abramovich. The Warsaw Voice (headed by
Jewish publisher and editor Andrzej Jonas) noted in 1999 that he is "the CEO
of the powerful Sibneft oil group. A popular joke in Moscow
says that one must count one's fingers after shaking hands with Abramovich,
who has for years been associated with Berezovsky's financial group."
[ZYGULSKI, p. 8] Oil magnate Leonid Nevzlin became head of the Russian
Jewish Congress in 2001. He and the aforementioned Mihail Khodorkowvsky
"formed one of the first successful private banks in Russia in 1989. The two
then went into the oil business together, and now run the YUKOS firm
-- Khodorkovsky is in charge, and Nevzlin is his deputy." The secular Jewish
Nevzlin, like so many, has returned to his Jewish roots. "For all my life,"
he says, "I have never felt any substantial anti-Semitism, and was rather
indifferent to the Jewish community. Then something clicked, and I thought,
Well, I'm over 40, I have made a successful career, I have made a fortune.
But what will I tell my children when I am 70." [GORODETSKY, L., 5-23-01]
Then there is Mikhail
Mirilashvili (a.ka., Misha Kutaisskey), who "is one of the biggest
shareholders of the local branch of LUK oil. He is also
president of Channel 11 and president and deputy chairman of
the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian chapter of the World Jewish
Congress." A brother, Konstantin, is the "co-owner of Gosting Dvor,
[St. Petersburg's] major shopping center." [KORALYEV, VLADIMIR, 10-11-2000]
Then there is Anatoly Karachinsky, "head of Information Business Systems,
Russia's largest IT group." Karachinsky, also Jewish, "is regarded in Russia
as the country's answer to Bill Gates -- and who is about to become the
country's first high-technology dollar millionaire." Karachinsky "set up
NewspaperDirect, a system that allows newspapers from anywhere in the
world to be printed on a desktop." [FINANCIAL TIMES, 10-2-00]

Then there is New York-based Stuart Subotnick, also Jewish, who is the
CEO and president of Metromedia International Group. (In 1999,
Subotnick was ranked by Forbes magazine among the richest 400
Americans). This company's specialty is cable, telephone, and digital media
-- largely in Eastern Europe. Holdings include complete -- or major --
shares in Russia's PLD Telekom, Kosmos TV ("one of Russia's
largest wireless cable operators"), 50% of Comstar ("a large Moscow
digital communications carrier"), Romsat ("one of the largest cable
operators in Romania"), 70% of "a leading Bucharest-based ISP (Internet
Service Provider) called FX Internet. Metromedia even has
holdings in places like Belarus and Kazakhstan. In Russia it also owns
"several TV and radio stations in St. Petersburg and Nizhii Novgorod."
[CAPITAL MARKET RUSSIA, 5-20-99; AFX EUROPEAN FOCUS, 1-12-01; CABLE EUROPE,
7-4-00; TELECOMMUNICATIONS SERVICES MARKET, 6-26-00]Howard Jacobson
rode with a taxi driver in recent years in New York City. The driver was a
fellow Jew, a recent immigrant from Russia. "He speaks Yiddish," noted
Jacobson in 1993,
"His family kept it
alive so that they could talk among themselves and
not be understood. 'A
secret language,' he explains.
The secret language
of the Jews. A light kept burning underground
all during those
years of atheism. I'd be touched if I wasn't alarmed. For where people
speak a secret language, how can suspicion and fear of them not
multiply?" [JACOBSON, H., 1993/1995, p. 80-81]
"Our people are not
blind," proclaimed the head of the Russian Communist Party, Gennady
Zyuganov, in 1998, "They cannot fail to see that the spread of Zionism in
the government is one of the reasons for the current catastrophe in the
country, the mass impoverishment and the process of extinction of its
people." [ENSEL, M., p. 3]
The blustering of an
anti-Semitic fanatic? In the same year, a Jewish Russian immigrant in New
York of considerable renown, novelist Edward Topol (whose work was once
banned in Russia), stirred controversy and deep concern in the world Jewish
community because of a published letter he wrote to a Russian weekly
newspaper. In it Topol called prominent Jewish Russian bankers "puppeteers"
who manipulated Russian politics and its economy. The puppeteers, he
concluded, has "a very long Jewish last name --
Berezovsko-Goussinsko-Smolensko-Khodrokovsko, etc. ... How come all or
almost all the money in this country ended up in Jewish hands?" Topol also
called the economic crisis in Russia today a "Jewish tragedy." "Mr. Topol's
main premise," noted the (Jewish) Forward, "is that for the first
time in a millennium, Jews have gained real political power and financial
control over Russia and can pretty much decide whether to 'cast the country
into a chaos of wars and poverty or raise it from the mud.'" [KRICHEVSKY,
Emigre's, p. 5; KAZAKINA, p. 5]
In 1997 the (Jewish)
Forward reported that "with the [Russian] economy in shambles,
opposition parties held nationwide strikes at the end of last month. [Even]
Jews are grumbling that too many Jews stand close to the reigns of power and
too many Jewish names fill the headlines." [BLUSTAIN, R, p. 1]
"All the Jews, I don't understand their motivation, to show they are
rich ... [to say] 'I am an owner and you are a slave,'" complained Alexander
Lieberman, the Jewish director of the Union Council's Russian-American
Bureau of Human Rights. "If I were a single Russian and I saw and heard only
Jews in the government ... [I would think] 'we are all without money because
the Jews have all the Russian money.'" [BLUSTAIN, p. 1]
"People have quite bitter memories of Jews in the [communist] revolution,"
noted Michael Chlenov, the president of the Jewish Va'ad of Russia.
In this regard,
transnationally, in 1996, Boris Berezovsky hosted a party in honor of the
earlier mentioned Ronald Lauder (American Jewish owner of a number of TV
stations in Europe), attended by Russian President Boris Yeltsin and United
States Ambassador Thomas Pickering. Speaking to a reporter, Lauder (already
ensnarled in partnership media dealings in the Ukraine with Russian
mafia-clouded Vadim Rabinovich) publicly distanced himself from Berezovsky,
saying, "The invitations went out in President Yeltsin's name." [FORBES, p.
91]